Level of Detail for 3D Graphics

Rating:
Summary: well written, clearly illustrated
Review: This book gives an excellent overview of the problems and solutions to level-of-detail rendering. Few books in the computer graphics field are this well written.

A few things to note:

- Though there's plenty of material on simplification of polygonal meshes, there doesn't seem to be much on volume (tetrahedral) simplification. My impression is that volume simplification is kind of hairy, though, and might require its own textbook.

- If you wish to do your own level of detail rendering, you may end up reading the papers referred to in the book. Most of those papers are available online (try google).

- The terrain chapter is great, and even deals with real-world issues (geospatial file formats, terrain data on the web, what a geoid is, etc) in addition to an overview of different approaches to terrain simplification.

If you're doing level-of-detail stuff, it is basically your duty to buy this book. I only wish I'd bought it eariler.

Rating:
Summary: Luebke
Review: This is clearly one of the most outstanding Level-of-Detail-for-3D-Graphics-algorithm-survey books currently in print. However I find Luebke, et al.'s choice of a subtitle puzzling. Clearly it should be "Level of Detail for 3D Graphics: Theory and Application", rather than "Level of Detail for 3D Graphics: Application and Theory". If Luebke, et. al. wanted to emphasize the applied nature of their work, it would've been more appropriate to title it "Level of Detail for 3D Graphics: Application, then Theory, and finally some more Application".

Frankly this oversight ruined the whole experience for me.