When a tree model meets texture baking: an approach for quality-preserving lightweight visualization in virtual 3D scene construction

Three-dimensional (3D) high-fidelity surface models play an important role in urban scene construction. However, the data quantity of such models is large and places a tremendous burden on rendering. Many applications must balance the visual quality of the models with the rendering efficiency. The study provides a practical texture baking processing pipeline for generating 3D models to reduce the model complexity and preserve the visually pleasing details. Concretely, we apply a mesh simplification to the original model and use texture baking to create three types of baked textures, namely, a diffuse map, normal map and displacement map. The simplified model with the baked textures has a pleasing visualization effect in a rendering engine. Furthermore, we discuss the influence of various factors in the process on the results, as well as the functional principles and characteristics of the baking textures. The proposed approach is very useful for real-time rendering with limited rendering hardware as no additional memory or computing capacity is required for properly preserving the relief details of the model. Each step in the pipeline is described in detail to facilitate the realization.