We present a method for end-to-end out-of-core simplification and view-dependent visualization of large surfaces. The method consists of three phases: (1) memory insensitive simplification; (2) memory insensitive construction of a multiresolution hierarchy; and (3) run-time, output-sensitive, view-dependent rendering and navigation of the mesh. The first two off-line phases are performed entirely on disk, and use only a small, constant amount of memory, whereas the run-time system pages in only the rendered parts of the mesh in a cache coherent manner. As a result, we are able to process and visualize arbitrarily large meshes given a sufficient amount of disk space; a constant multiple of the size of the input mesh. Similar to recent work on out-of-core simplification, our memory insensitive method uses vertex clustering on a rectilinear octree grid to coarsen and create a hierarchy for the mesh, and a quadric error metric to choose vertex positions at all levels of resolution.
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