A Change of Focus
•Hoppe 1998 – Highly irregular Connectivity
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•Lindstrom 1996 – Semi-regular Connectivity
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•Losasso & Hoppe 2004 – Totally regular Connectivity
We want to get interactive frame rates
Traditionally, the rendering time was the limiting factor, so research focused on minimizing the polygon count
Now as rendering hardware becomes faster, the strict “number” of polygons is no longer a grave concern -- we need to look at other bottlenecks. Therefore, recent methods focus on geometry regularity, optimized for graphics hardware.

3 papers we see the evolution of this idea:
Hoppe 98 was very good at minimizing the number of triangles drawn to the screen, at the expense of having highly irregular geometry
Lindstrom had a somewhat more regular layout of the geometry, but triangle size was dependent on the topography of the terrain
Hoppe 04 has highly regular triangle sizes, irrespective of the terrain itself.