A 3-D Scene Management Method Based on the Triangular Mesh for Large-Scale Web3D Scenes

Abstract

Real-time rendering of large-scale Web3D scenes was difficult to implement in virtual reality systems and geographic information system (GIS) in the past because of the technical constraints in CPU, memory, and network bandwidth. In this paper, a model management strategy was proposed based on triangular meshes, in which neighborhood buildings are considered as nodes and connected. Each node in the mesh has a set of level of detail (LOD) models, including high, medium, and low precision models. Besides a model file, the high precision LOD of the node can be a subtriangular mesh as well. The three-dimensional (3-D) models in a complex scene can be flexibly managed with some nested triangular meshes. The memory management strategy and the display management strategy were discussed in this paper. According to the experimental results, the proposed method effectively achieves the progressive downloading, dynamic loading, and real-time display for a large-scale 3-D scene. Its performance is better than the traditional methods.