This page illustrates the progressive coding technique described in "Progressive Compression for Lossless Transmission of Triangle Meshes" as described in Siggraph 2001 paper. The application is one instance of an implementation of the paper. It opens wrl 97 files containing one 2-manifold triangle mesh, and allows the user to progressively encode it in a .vpm file (ie "valence-based progressive mesh"), then progressively decode or decode in full by dragging & dropping one vpm file.

Several options are available. Resulting bit-rates are given in bits per vertex for geometry and connectivity, and you can compare the size of the original vrml mesh and its compressed version. The executable has been compiled for a Win32 platform (Windows 9x/NT/2000) and uses the OpenGL library. We suggest that you take a couple of minutes to see how to tune the encoding process on a mesh example. 

Downloads
Executable (622 KB, Windows 9x/NT/2000 application, requires OpenGL).
15 Models in vrml.zip format (3339 KB, are courtesy of Caltech, Stanford, Hugues Hoppe, and Renato Pajarola).
15 Models in compressed format (360 KB, notice the file size compared to the vrml models encoded with winzip).

Paper (2.4 MBytes)
Slides (9 MBytes)

Note
The source files are not available, and we cannot afford any additional technical support than provided in this section. Send an email if you have some (2-manifold triangle) meshes to convert in the adequate format. 

Important: the actual tool contains a coarse version of a vrml parser and accepts vrml 97 files exported via 3d studio max. Meshes must be 2-manifold triangle ones, with arbitrary genus and boundaries.

Acknowledgments 
The code was written by Pierre Alliez. The current implementation uses one version of the Range Coder developed by Michael Schindler.