My Work in Multiresolution Modeling

These are my Web pages, so I think it's fair that I get a whole page devoted to my work. For those of you just stopping by, looking around here should give you some idea of what I've done.

Online Bibliography

As a result of our work in this area, Paul Heckbert and I have accumulated a fairly large BibTeX database of relevant papers. We're making this online version available for general use.

Software

Over time, I've released some software packages that I've developed. Papers describing the relevant details of this software can be found in the next section.

QSlim

This software package is capable of simplifying triangulated models of arbitrary topology.

Scape

An experimental system for triangulating height fields.

Terra

Based on Scape, but cleaner and with some nicer features. I started writing Terra as a major improvement over Scape. Since I stopped actively working on terrain approximation, I never completed all the features that I originally intended.

Papers

Here's a selection of papers that I've written on topics relating to multiresolution modeling.

Multiresolution Modeling For Fast Rendering,

by Paul Heckbert and Michael Garland, Graphics Interface '94.
The version published in Graphics Interface had certain errors that have been corrected in this online version.

We wrote this general paper a couple of years ago. It basically outlines why multiresolution modeling is important and useful. We also made some comments about possible different approaches for the representation and generation of multiresolution models.

Fast Polygonal Approximation of Terrains and Height Fields,

by Michael Garland and Paul Heckbert (Technical Report CMU-CS-95-181).
A color plate is included separately.

More recently, I spent quite a bit of time working on generating approximations of digital terrain models. This explains the fairly large number of terrain references below. The results described in this paper are based on the Scape software package.

Survey of Surface Simplification Algorithms,

by Paul Heckbert and Michael Garland.
This draft appeared in the SIGGRAPH 97 course on Multiresolution Surface Modeling The final revision will be published as a CMU-CS Technical Report.

This is a fairly comprehensive survey of the sorts of things people have done in this area. It was originally focused primarily on terrain simplification. But its scope has become significantly broader.

Surface Simplification Using Quadric Error Metrics,

by Michael Garland and Paul Heckbert
Proceedings SIGGRAPH 97.

This paper discusses my more recent work in general surface simplification. An experimental implementation of this surface simplification algorithm is available in the QSlim software package.

Simplifying Surfaces with Color and Texture using Quadric Error Metrics,

by Michael Garland and Paul Heckbert
Proceedings IEEE Visualization 98.

This paper outlines my extension of the SIGGRAPH 97 algorithm to handle surfaces with material properties.