Generating level-of-detail meshes using MeshOptimizer

To get started with geometry manipulations, let’s implement a mesh geometry simplification demo using the MeshOptimizer library that, besides mesh optimizations, can generate simplified meshes for real-time discrete level-of-detail (LOD) algorithms we might want to use later. Simplification is an efficient way to improve rendering performance.

For GPUs to render a mesh efficiently, all vertices in the vertex buffer should be unique and without duplicates. Solving this problem efficiently can be a complicated and computationally intensive task in any modern 3D content pipeline. MeshOptimizer is an open-source C++ library developed by Arseny Kapoulkine, which provides algorithms to help optimize meshes for modern GPU vertex and index processing pipelines. It can reindex an existing index buffer or generate an entirely new set of indices from an unindexed vertex buffer.

Let’s learn how to optimize and generate...