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Multiresolution Modeling Software
For those who are interested in actually simplifying data, I've
collected some links to available simplification software. I have not
used most of the software listed here. Even the ones I have used, I
have only toyed with. Consequently, I can't say much about the
relative quality of the software. However, I have tried to indicate
what basic algorithms they use.
Free Software
To one degree or another, the software packages in this section are
all free. They may have licenses with varying restrictions, but, to
the best of my knowledge, no licensing fees are required.
- QSlim
- Program based on my SIGGRAPH 97 paper on
quadric error metrics. It
can produce high quality approximations of triangulated surfaces
quite rapidly. Source code and executables for various platforms
are provided.
- Terra/Scape
- These two programs are based on earlier work I did on the
approximation of height fields by triangulated surfaces. If you know
that your data is a height field sampled on a regular grid, this kind
of height field-specific algorithm can be much faster than more
general decimation algorithms.
- LODESTAR
- LODESTAR is a level of detail generator for VRML. At the moment,
I don't have any other details on it.
- VTK Library
- The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) provides much more than surface
simplification software. It is in fact a large and comprehensive
library of visualization-related code. However, of particular
interest here is the vtkDecimate filter which it
provides. This implements a version of the vertex decimation
algorithm described by Schroeder et al.
- JADE
- This is another software package which implements a vertex
decimation algorithm. It would seem to use a more accurate error
estimate than that used by Schroeder et al.
- Mesh Optimization
- Among other things, this software implements the mesh optimization
algorithm described by Hoppe et al..
- Simplification Envelopes
- An implementation of the simpliication envelopes algorithm
described by Cohen, Varshney, et al.
- PolyReduce
- A system which generates polygonal isosurfaces from volume data.
As the last stage in reconstruction, it uses a mesh decimation
pass to simplify the surface.
- Lightwave Plugins
- Marvin Landis has built several Lightwave plugins that implement
various surface simplification algorithms. There are plugins for
the vertex decimation of Schroeder et al., my
Scape terrain approximation algorithm, and my
Quadric error decimation algorithm.
- 3D Decimator
Free TGS demo software for Windows. Can
handle VRML and Open Inventor files.
Commercial Software
-
Automatic level-of-detail generation is a part of IBM's
Interaction Accelerator.
- This software implements a uniform vertex clustering algorithm as
described by Rossignac and Borrel
- Alias/Wavefront
- At one time, I had a link to information about the polygon
reduction in Alias. That page no longer exists, and I haven't been
able to find the information on their current site.
- Rational Reducer (formerly PolyRed)
- A simplification program for VRML 1.0 and VRML 2.0 models.
- IMCompress
from InnovMetric
- This software implements a vertex decimation algorithm described
by Soucy and Laurendeau.
[Table of Contents]
Michael Garland
garland@cs.cmu.edu
Last modified: Wed Mar 24 16:16:30 EST 1999
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