Efficiently computing and updating triangle strips for real-time rendering

Triangle strips are a widely used hardware-supported data-structure to compactly represent and efficiently render polygonal meshes. In thispaper we survey the efficient generation of triangle strips as well as their variants. We present efficient algorithms for partitioning polygonal
meshes into triangle strips. Triangle strips have traditionally used a buffer size of two vertices. In this paper we also study the impact of larger
buffer sizes and various queuing disciplines on the effectiveness of triangle strips. View-dependent simplification has emerged as a powerful
tool for graphics acceleration in visualization of complex environments. However, in a view-dependent framework the triangle mesh
connectivity changes at every frame making it difficult to use triangle strips. In this paper we present a novel data-structure, Skip Strip,
that efficiently maintains triangle strips during such view-dependent changes. A Skip Strip stores the vertex hierarchy nodes in a skip-list-like
manner with path compression. We anticipate that Skip Strips will provide a road-map to combine rendering acceleration techniques for
static datasets, typical of retained-mode graphics applications, with those for dynamic datasets found in immediate-mode applications.