Progressive isosurface extraction from tetrahedral meshes

Abstract

The authors present a technique for transforming a tetrahedral mesh into a progressive representation based on half edge collapses. This allows the efficient transmission of the mesh from a remote computer where the simulation was computed to a visualization computer. During the transmission, the user can start visualizing while the transmission is still in progress. We show a technique for progressively extracting isosurfaces from the progressive mesh. Starting with the base mesh, an isosurface for a specific value is computed and will locally be improved where a vertex is inserted into the mesh.