From: sainitzer <e9025935@student.tuwien.ac.at>
Subject: ANNOUNCE: Level of Detail Generator for VRML 1.0
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 19:55:31 +0200
Message-ID: <31F7B513.72727351@student.tuwien.ac.at>
Organization: Vienna University of Technology, Austria



ANNOUNCEMENT:

   LODESTAR -  Level of Detail Generator for VRML 1.0  Release 1.0  (freeware)


Please distribute this in your environment ...

The LODESTAR Home Page:
   http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/vr/lodestar/


Desription:

Complex 3-D objects easily overload even hardware assisted rendering
and compromise interactive frame rates needed for VR applications.  To
overcome this restriction, objects (usually defined as a polygonal
representation) are stored in multiple levels of detail with
progressively decreasing polygon counts. At runtime, an appropriate
level of detail is selected to obtain the maximum image quality, and
avoid overload of the rendering pipeline.

However, manual creation of levels of detail for complex models is too
labor intensive. Therefore, a tool is needed to generate LODs (levels
of detail) automatically.

We have implemented such a tool that supports VRML-1.0. It is able to
reduce indexed face sets (polygonal data) and indexed line sets that
embody the bulk of VRML data commonly found in VRML models. The
algorithm is based on octree quantization of vertices.

The tool reads a VRML file and generates LODs for each IndexedFaceSet
and IndexedLineSet. Further the tool removes double defined
coordinates, materials, normals, texture coordinates, faces and lines
within the VRML nodes. The resulting VRML scene will be written into a
new file.


Technical University of Vienna
Department of Computer Graphics
Visualization and Animation Group
http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/vr/

E-Mail:
   buchegg@cg.tuwien.ac.at
   sainitz@cg.tuwien.ac.at


Herbert & Reinhard
~