ANIMATION STRATEGIES FOR SMOOTH TRANSFORMATIONS BETWEEN DISCRETE LODS OF 3D BUILDING MODELS

The cartographic 3D visualization of urban areas has experienced tremendous progress over the last years. An increasing number of applications operate interactively in real-time and thus require advanced techniques to improve the quality and time response of dynamic scenes. The main focus of this article concentrates on the discussion of strategies for smooth transformation between two discrete levels of detail (LOD) of 3D building models that are represented as restricted triangle meshes. Because the operation order determines the geometrical and topological properties of the transformation process as well as its visual perception by a human viewer, three different strategies are proposed and subsequently analyzed. The simplest one orders transformation operations by the length of the edges to be collapsed, while the other two strategies introduce a general transformation direction in the form of a moving plane. This plane either pushes the nodes that need to be removed, e.g. during the transformation of a detailed LOD model to a coarser one, towards the main building body, or triggers the edge collapse operations used as transformation paths for the cartographic generalization.