Efficient triangular shaped meshes
View Patent ↗The present invention renders a triangular mesh for employment in graphical displays. The triangular mesh comprises triangle-shaped graphics primitives. The triangle-shaped graphics primitives represent a subdivided triangular shape. Each triangle-shaped graphics primitive shares defined vertices with adjoining triangle-shaped graphics primitives. These shared vertices are transmitted and employed for the rendering of the triangle-shaped graphics primitives.
1. A method for employing video information associated with a triangular mesh, comprising:
(a) deriving a plurality of adjacent triangle primitives of a first row of triangle primitives and at least a next row of triangle primitives, wherein each triangle primitive comprises at least one lower vertex and at least one upper vertex;
(b) defining unique mesh vertices that are required to construct the triangular mesh, wherein each unique mesh vertex represents a vertex of one or more triangle primitives;
(c) for the first row of triangle primitives, caching lower unique mesh vertices and upper unique mesh vertices, wherein each unique mesh vertex is only represented once;
(d) overwriting lower unique mesh vertices of the next row of triangle primitives with the upper unique mesh vertices of the first row of triangle primitives;
(e) caching upper unique mesh vertices of the next row of triangle primitives; and
(f) repeating steps (d)–(e) as necessary, thereby generating a triangular mesh.
2. The method of claim 1 , further comprising the step of rendering the triangular mesh.
3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the step of deriving further comprises the step of subdividing a triangular shape into triangle primitives.
4. The method of claim 3 , wherein the step of subdividing comprises creating a substantially equalized bisection.
5. The method of claim 4 , wherein the subdividing comprises creating a substantially equalized n-section.
6. A method for transmitting display information, comprising:
subdividing a triangular shape of display information into triangle primitives, wherein each triangle primitive has at least one lower vertex and at least one upper vertex;
defining unique mesh vertices that represent the triangle primitives, wherein each unique mesh vertex is a vertex of at least one triangle primitive;
transmitting unique mesh vertices, wherein each unique mesh vertex is only transmitted once, wherein the step of transmitting further comprises:
(a) transmitting and caching lower unique mesh vertices and upper unique mesh vertices of a first row of triangle primitives;
(b) overwriting lower unique mesh vertices of a next row of triangle primitives with the upper unique mesh vertices of the first row of triangle primitives;
(c) transmitting and caching upper unique mesh vertices of the next row of triangle primitives;
(d) repeating steps (b)–(c) as necessary; and rendering a triangular mesh from the plurality of triangle primitives.
7. The method of claim 6 , wherein the subdividing comprises recursively performing substantially equalized bisections.
8. The method of claim 6 , wherein the subdividing comprises creating a substantially equalized n-section.
9. The method of claim 6 , wherein the step of subdividing further decomposes a subdivision into further subdivisions, but not exceeding the maximum receptive capacity of a vertex cache.
10. A computer program product for employing video information associated with a triangular mesh, the computer program product having a medium with a computer program embodied thereon, the computer program comprising:
(a) computer code for deriving a plurality of adjacent triangle primitives of a first row of triangle primitives and at least a next row of triangle primitives, wherein each triangle primitive comprises at least one lower vertex and at least one upper vertex;
(b) computer code for defining unique mesh vertices that are required to construct the triangular mesh, wherein each unique mesh vertex represents a vertex of one or more triangle primitives;
(c) computer code for caching lower unique mesh vertices and upper unique mesh vertices of the first row of triangle primitives, wherein each unique mesh vertex is only represented once;
(d) computer code for overwriting lower unique mesh vertices of the next row of triangle primitives with the upper unique mesh vertices of the first row of triangle primitives;
(e) computer code for caching upper unique mesh vertices of triangle primitives; and
(f) repeating steps (d)–(e) as necessary, thereby generating a triangular mesh.
11. A method for employing video information associated with a triangular mesh, comprising:
deriving a plurality of contiguous triangle primitives from the video information, wherein each triangle primitive comprises two lower and one upper vertices or two upper and one lower vertices;
for each contiguous triangle primitive in a first row (r=1) of triangle primitives, wherein the first row is an outer row of the triangular mesh, caching both the upper and lower vertices;
for each contiguous triangle primitive in a second row or y row, where y=r+1, of triangle primitives adjacent to the first row or r row, caching only the vertices that do not overlap the vertices in the first row or r row and overwriting the overlapping vertices of the second row or y row with the overlapping vertices of the first row or r row, such that each vertex in the second row or y row is cached only once;
add 1 to r; and
for each y row, repeating the above two steps until no more rows exists, thereby creating the triangular mesh.