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Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia

MADAME3D

Multiresolution adaptive rendering of massive dense meshes and complex 3D models

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Challenge

In many application areas, including cultural heritage, architecture, engineering, environment and medicine, the visualization of an accurate survey of scenes of interest is required.

The rapid evolution of shape and color capture technologies, from active scanning to computational photography, accompanied by improvements in automatic 3D reconstruction techniques made possible by the proliferation of low-cost parallel platforms, is potentially allowing a large number of users to have at their disposal, at a reasonable cost, large amounts of very high resolution geometric data. At the same time, 3D digital modeling solutions (e.g., CAD) are also generating massive highly complex datasets. Interactive exploration of these digital models is a prerequisite for a large number of applications and for the creation of innovative products and services.

Unfortunately, however, the size of these models, which today easily exceeds billions of triangles and tens of GB of data, makes their management difficult with the industrial methods currently available. The models thus acquired are certainly very detailed, but, for this very reason, intrinsically endowed with a considerable amount of information. Even if current storage technologies allow to efficiently store very large files, their use, in terms of distribution and interactive 3D visualization in real time, a prerequisite for most applications, requires specialized solutions.

Overview

CRS4 has created and developed over the years a suite of methods for supporting inspection of triangulated surface models characterized by a high sample density, such as those generated by laser scanning. One of our results is the introduction of a coarse grained multiresolution model based on hierarchical volumetric decomposition, that led to the first GPU bound high quality techniques for large scale meshes and complex 3D models. Our methods are implemented in software suites that cover parallel out-of-core construction from triangle soups, GPU-friendly compression, multiresolution model access from out-of-core or over the net and adaptive rendering on GPU-accelerated desktop and mobile platforms. Our library has been used in a variety of projects, including Digital Mont’e Prama.

Innovative features

• first GPU accelerated methods for seamless adaptation at general high-density meshes;
• complete solutions for scalable processing, remote distribution, and rendering on a variety of platforms.

Potential users

Researchers in visual computing, simulation experts, graphics programmers.

Impact sectors

ICT - Cultural Heritage.

Other resources

1. Digital Mont’e Prama
2. Enrico Gobbetti, Fabio Marton, Marcos Balsa Rodriguez, Fabio Ganovelli, and Marco Di Benedetto. Adaptive Quad Patches: an Adaptive Regular Structure for Web Distribution and Adaptive Rendering of 3D Models. In Proc. ACM Web3D International Symposium. Pages 9-16, August 2012. ACM Press. New York, NY, USA. (Best Long Paper Award)
3. Marcos Balsa Rodríguez, Enrico Gobbetti, Fabio Marton, and Alex Tinti. Coarse-grained Multiresolution Structures for Mobile Exploration of Gigantic Surface Models. In Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia Symposium on Mobile Graphics and Interactive Applications. Pages 4:1-4:6, November 2013. ACM.
4. Marcos Balsa Rodriguez, Enrico Gobbetti, Fabio Marton, and Alex Tinti. Compression-domain Seamless Multiresolution Visualization of Gigantic Meshes on Mobile Devices. In Proc. ACM Web3D International Symposium. Pages 99-107, June 2013. ACM Press. New York, NY, USA.