# Adaptive render facets in VTK?

**URL:** https://discourse.vtk.org/t/adaptive-render-facets-in-vtk/5333
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [March 6, 2021, 6:23am UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/adaptive-render-facets-in-vtk/5333 "2021-03-06T06:23:25Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![GregVernon](https://discourse.vtk.org/user_avatar/discourse.vtk.org/gregvernon/32/3123_2.png) [@GregVernon](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/GregVernon)
#### Post date: [March 6, 2021, 6:23am UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/adaptive-render-facets-in-vtk/5333/1 "2021-03-06T06:23:25Z")

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Is there any functionality in VTK for adaptive render facets (of nonlinear curves and surfaces) based on the current view? I know there’s the LOD functionality in ParaView, but that reduces the fidelity during view transformation. What I’m interested in understanding is whether something similar to Fusion360’s behavior exists - [see this example I recorded](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi0cSqlBrhM).

Essentially, when zoomed out, everything uses a coarser tessellation. After zooming in on a region, it updates _only_ the surfaces in view with a finer tessellation. As soon as we move/zoom to a different location, the previous location goes back to a coarse tessellation and the new location draws with an appropriately fine tessellation.

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### Author: ![will.schroeder](https://discourse.vtk.org/user_avatar/discourse.vtk.org/will.schroeder/32/233_2.png) [@will.schroeder](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/will.schroeder)
#### Post date: [March 7, 2021, 12:38pm UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/adaptive-render-facets-in-vtk/5333/2 "2021-03-07T12:38:18Z")

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We had a project several years ago that did something along the lines of what you describe. If you check out Filters/Generic/vtkGenericDataSetTessellator (and the other classes in that directory) you can see some of the work. It is not heavily used and I suspect it needs some love to bring it up to speed / get it working properly.

There were also a couple of technical papers written about this.

William J. Schroeder. François Bertel. Mathieu Malaterre. David Thompson. Methods and framework for visualizing higher-order finite elements. July 2006. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 12(4):446-60.