图书介绍

Level of Detail for 3D Graphics

"A textbook treatment of the concepts, theories, algorithms and data structures essential for modeling detailed three-dimensional graphic worlds. The authors provide a conceptual framework for striking the tricky balance between increasing levels of detail (LOD) and the need for smooth, flowing animation. This technical reference will be of use to professionals in game development, computer animation, information visualization, and virtual reality fields." - Design Issues

This book gives an excellent overview of the problems and solutions to level-of-detail rendering. Few books in the computer graphics field are this well written.

A few things to note:

- Though there's plenty of material on simplification of polygonal meshes, there doesn't seem to be much on volume (tetrahedral) simplification. My impression is that volume simplification is kind of hairy, though, and might require its own textbook.

- If you wish to do your own level of detail rendering, you may end up reading the papers referred to in the book. Most of those papers are available online (try google).

- The terrain chapter is great, and even deals with real-world issues (geospatial file formats, terrain data on the web, what a geoid is, etc) in addition to an overview of different approaches to terrain simplification.

If you're doing level-of-detail stuff, it is basically your duty to buy this book. I only wish I'd bought it eariler.

Rapidshare Link

http://rapidshare.com/files/350755742/Level_of_Detail_for_3D_Graphics.pdf