Genus-reducing simplifications are important in constructing multiresolution hierarchies for level-of-detail-based rendering, especially for datasets that have several relatively small holes, tunnels, and cavities. We present a genus-reducing simplification approach that is complementary to the existing work on genus-preserving simplifications. We propose a simplification framework in which genus-reducing and genus-preserving simplifications alternate to yield much better multiresolution hierarchies than would have been possible by using either one of them. In our approach we first identify the holes and the concavities by extending the concept of hulls to polygonal meshes under the L1 distance metric and then generate valid triangulations to fill them. CR Categories and Subject Descriptors: I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation -- Display algorithms; I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Geometry and Object Modeling -- Curve, surface, solid, and object representation...