"Subdivision Surfaces for Computer Games"

Supervised by A.Watt

Abstract

The idea behind subdivision surfaces for 3D polygon meshes has been around for many years but the possibilities of its application in computer and video games has only been looked into recently, thanks to the rapid growth and development of 3D graphics in the games industry. This dissertation describes the implementation of a new subdivision scheme outlined in a paper entitled 'MAPS: Multiresolution Adaptive Parameterisation of Surfaces' by Aaron Lee, Wim Sweldens, Peter Schroder, Lawrence Cowsar and David Dobkin.

While not strictly a paper about subdivision or the handling level of detail (LOD) in computer graphics, it introduces a new subdivision method which uses parameterisations for perturbing the new vertices to optimal positions when subdividing the surface of the base-domain mesh. The base domain and parameterisations are derived by performing a mesh-simplification of a high-resolution mesh while preserving information regarding the positions of the removed vertices. The implementation described in this project only covers this parameterised mesh-simplification.

This project will provide a brief introduction to the theories behind mesh simplification and LOD handling followed by a literature review of relevant work. The main body of this dissertation will describe the design and implementation of various data structures and algorithms used during the course of the project as well as the results obtained. This will end with an evaluation of the project and some conclusions drawn from throughout the dissertation.