Single-Strip Triangulation of Manifolds with Arbitrary Topology

Abstract: Triangle strips have been widely used for efficient rendering. It is NP-complete to test whether a given triangulated model can be represented as a single triangle strip, so many heuristics have been proposed to partition models into few long strips. In this paper, we present a new algorithm for creating a single triangle loop or strip from a triangulated model. Our method applies a dual graph matching algorithm to partition the mesh into cycles, and then merges pairs of cycles by splitting adjacent triangles when necessary. New vertices are introduced at midpoints of edges and the new triangles thus formed are coplanar with their parent triangles, hence the visual fidelity of the geometry is not changed. We prove that the increase in the number of triangles due to this splitting is 50% in the worst case, however for all models we tested the increase was less than 2%. We also prove tight bounds on the number of triangles needed for a single-strip representation of a model with holes on its boundary. Our strips can be used not only for efficient rendering, but also for other applications including the generation of space filling curves on a manifold of any arbitrary topology.