Priority-Based Level of Detail Approach for Animation Interpolation of Articulated Objects

This paper presents an LOD technique applicable to articulated characters in real-time graphical simulation or video game software. This new method does not eliminate the polygon counts of the graphical model due to the change of distance to the viewer. Rather, the rendering expense is cut by the reduction of the animation interpolations between key frames based on a priority number that is calculated and assigned by taking several factors into account, including rotation, translation, scaling, number of children and depth in the hierarchical structure. An analysis to those sub-components of the hierarchical animation is conducted and an equation is established to qualify the contribution to visual effects of such animation sequence. The benchmark tests demonstrate that, under certain conditions, our approach can significantly reduce the number of interpolated with no noticeable visual artifacts.