Streaming simplification of tetrahedral meshes
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Updated: Jul 19, 2026

New Features in Visual Dynamics 3.0
Published on: August 9, 2024
Huy T Vo1, Steven P Callahan, Peter Lindstrom
1Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA. hvo@sci.utah.edu
Abstract:
Unstructured tetrahedral meshes are commonly used in scientific computing to represent scalar, vector, and tensor fields in three dimensions. Visualization of these meshes can be difficult to perform interactively due to their size and complexity. By reducing the size of the data, we can accomplish real-time visualization necessary for scientific analysis. We propose a two-step approach for streaming simplification of large tetrahedral meshes. Our algorithm arranges the data on disk in a streaming, I/O-efficient format that allows coherent access to the tetrahedral cells. A quadric-based simplification is sequentially performed on small portions of the mesh in-core. Our output is a coherent streaming mesh which facilitates future processing. Our technique is fast, produces high quality approximations, and operates out-of-core to process meshes too large for main memory.
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