
26 Chapter 2
Mesh Simplification
Figure 2.8
A vertex removal operation. (a) A vertex
va
is chosen for removal. (b) The vertex
and all surrounding triangles are removed, leaving a hole in the mesh. (c) The hole is
retriangulated with two fewer triangles than the original mesh.
are then triangulated. As an example, we can consider the shaded triangles in Figure
2.8(a) to have been merged in (b) and then retriangulated in (c). Polygon merging is,
however, more general than vertex removal since it can combine polygons (not just
triangles), can result in removal of several vertices at once, and may even result in
merged ...