SimpliGuard: Robust Mesh Simplification In the Wild

Polygonal meshes are widely used to represent complex geometries. However, the increasing complexity of models often leads to large meshes with millions of triangles, raising significant challenges for storage, transmission, and computation. Mesh simplification, a process of reducing the number of triangles in a mesh while preserving its overall shape and important features, has emerged as an indispensable technique to address these challenges. In this work, we focus on the problem of obtaining a visually consistent ultra-low-polygon mesh for complex meshes. Unlike previous methods, we design a robust simplification framework, SimpliGuard, to handle any meshes in the wild. Firstly, a reconstruction module is used to construct a low-polygon mesh with a similar shape but a manifold topology. Then, a texture initialization module is employed to quickly initialize the entire texture map. After that, a differentiable rendering module is utilized to optimize the overall structure and texture details, ensuring high-quality results. For meshes with skeletons, the correctness of motion can be preserved with our designed motion post-processing module. Experimental results demonstrate that SimpliGuard significantly outperforms previous methods and various featured software, including Blender and Simplygon.