PaMO: Parallel Mesh Optimization for Intersection‐Free Low‐Poly Modeling on the GPU

Abstract Reducing the triangle count in complex 3D models is a basic geometry preprocessing step in graphics pipelines such as efficient rendering and interactive editing. However, most existing mesh simplification methods exhibit a few issues. Firstly, they often lead to self‐intersections during decimation, a major issue for applications such as 3D printing and soft‐body simulation. Second, to perform simplification on a mesh in the wild, one would first need to perform re‐meshing, which often suffers from surface shifts and losses of sharp features. Finally, existing re‐meshing and simplification methods can take minutes when processing large‐scale meshes, limiting their applications in practice. To address the challenges, we introduce a novel GPU‐based mesh optimization approach containing three key components: (1) a parallel re‐meshing algorithm to turn meshes in the wild into watertight, manifold, and intersection‐free ones, and reduce the prevalence of poorly shaped triangles; (2) a robust parallel simplification algorithm with intersection‐free guarantees; (3) an optimization‐based safe projection algorithm to realign the simplified mesh with the input, eliminating the surface shift introduced by re‐meshing and recovering the original sharp features. The algorithm demonstrates remarkable efficiency, simplifying a 2‐million‐face mesh to 20k triangles in 3 seconds on RTX4090. We evaluated the approach on the Thingi10K dataset and showcased its exceptional performance in geometry preservation and speed. https://seonghunn.github.io/pamo/