Patent attributes
Techniques of compressing level of detail (LOD) data involve defining a cost metric that predicts how much computing resources are necessary to decode and render a mesh at a given LOD. The cost metric may be optimized by a selection of a LOD reduction process of a plurality of processes at each LOD reduction step. For each process of the plurality of processes, the LOD is reduced according to that process and the resulting reduced LOD is evaluated according to the cost metric. Each such process at that LOD reduction step produces a respective LOD, which includes a mesh, one or more texture atlases, and/or other attributes. The LOD produced by the process having the lowest value of the cost metric at a reduction step is the LOD that is input into the next LOD reduction step.