MPEG-4 Book, The

9.4. 3D Mesh Coding

Three-dimensional mesh coding (3DMC) was introduced in MPEG-4 Visual, Version 2 [M4V2]. Because of its name, 3DMC might be confused with an extension to 2D mesh coding, which is not the case as 3DMC is a new SNHC technology to efficiently represent synthetic 3D models. Whereas 2D mesh coding was introduced to support video manipulation through 2D meshes, 3DMC provides a representation and compression tool for IndexedFaceSet nodes of 3D objects onto which images and video may be mapped. It is worth noting that 3DMC is to compress static 3D models, not their animation, which is yet another clear difference between 2D mesh coding and 3DMC. 3DMC provides additional functionalities—such as high compression, incremental rendering, ...