GoLD: Interactive display of huge colored and textured models

This paper presents a new technique for fast, view-dependent, real-time visualization of large multiresolution geometric models with color or texture information. This method uses geomorphing to smoothly interpolate between geometric patches composing a hierarchical level-of-detail structure, and to maintain seamless continuity between neighboring patches of the model. It combines the advantages of view-dependent rendering with numerous additional features: the high performance rendering associated with static preoptimized geometry, the capability to display at both low and high resolution with minimal artefacts, and a low CPU usage since all the geomorphing is done on the GPU. Furthermore, the hierarchical subdivision of the model into a tree structure can be accomplished according to any spatial or topological criteria. This property is particularly useful in dealing with models with high resolution textures derived from digital photographs. Results are presented for both highly tesselated models (372 million triangles), and for models which also contain large quantities of texture (200 million triangles + 20 GB of compressed texture). The method also incorporates asynchronous out-of-core model management. Performances obtained on commodity hardware are in the range of 50 million geomorphed triangles/second for a benchmark model such as Stanford's St. Matthew dataset.