Seamless Patches for GPU-Based Terrain Rendering Algorithm Implementation

Tato diplomová práce se zabývá vykreslováním terénu s využitím moderního algoritmu pro adaptivní úroveň detailů. Popisuje dvě v současnosti nejpoužívanější grafická aplikační rozhraní a jejich high-level nadstavby a shrnuje princip a vlastnosti několika používaných level-of-detail algoritmů pro zobrazování terénu. Podrobněji pak popisuje implementaci algoritmu Seamless patches for GPU-based terrain rendering.This master's thesis deals with terrain rendering using a modern algorithm for adaptive level of detail. It describes two currently most used graphical application interfaces and high-level libraries that use them and summarizes principles and features of several level-of-detail algorithms for terrain rendering. In more detail it then describes the implementation of Seamless patches for GPU-based terrain rendering algorithm.

Terrain LoD Algorithm Implementation

Tato práce pojednává o implementaci algoritmu pro LoD vizualizaci terénu Seamless Patches for GPU-Based Terrain Rendering jako rozšíření knihovny Coin3D. Prezentuje postupy, za pomoci kterých tento algoritmus zobrazuje rozsáhlé terénní datasety. Celý terén je složen z plátů, které jsou uloženy v hierarchické struktuře. Hierarchie plátů je pak za běhu programu procházena jsou z ní generovány aktivní pláty na základě pozice pozorovatele. Každý plát se skládá z předem definovaných dlaždic a spojovacích pruhů, takže nemusí udžovat žádnou konkrétní geometrii. Během vykreslování dlaždic a pruhů je aplikován displacement shader. Práce zhodnocuje výsledky dosažené implementací a navrhuje další úpravy, kterými by se dal běh algoritmu dále vylepšit.This thesis discusses implementation of LoD terrain visualization algorithm Seamless Patches for GPU-Based Terrain Rendering as extension for Coin3D library. It presents procedures which this algorithm uses for displaying large terrain datasets. Entire terrain is composed of patches that are stored in patch hierarchy. Patch hierarchy is traversed during runtime to generate active patches based on observer's position. Each patch consists of predefined tiles and connection strips so it doesn't need to store any geometry. During render of tiles and strips, displacement shader is applied. This thesis also evaluates results achieved in sample application and suggests some modifications to further increase algorithm performance.

Methods for Automated Creation and Efficient Visualisation of Large-Scale Terrains based on Real Height-Map Data

Real-time rendering of large-scale terrains is a difficult problem and remains an active field of research. The massive scale of these landscapes, where the ratio between the size of the terrain and its resolution is spanning multiple orders of magnitude, requires an efficient level of detail strategy. It is crucial that the geometry, as well as the terrain data, are represented seamlessly at varying distances while maintaining a constant visual quality. This thesis investigates common techniques and previous solutions to problems associated with the rendering of height field terrains and discusses their benefits and drawbacks. Subsequently, two solutions to the stated problems are presented, which build and expand upon the state-of-the-art rendering methods. A seamless and efficient mesh representation is achieved by the novel Uniform Distance-Dependent Level of Detail (UDLOD) triangulation method. This fully GPU-based algorithm subdivides a quadtree covering the terrain into small tiles, which can be culled in parallel, and are morphed seamlessly in the vertex shader, resulting in a densely and temporally consistent triangulated mesh. The proposed Chunked Clipmap combines the strengths of both quadtrees and clipmaps to enable efficient out-of-core paging of terrain data. This data structure allows for constant time view-dependent access, graceful degradation if data is unavailable, and supports trilinear and anisotropic filtering. Together these, otherwise independent, techniques enable the rendering of large-scale real-world terrains, which is demonstrated on a dataset encompassing the entire Free State of Saxony at a resolution of one meter, in real-time

Distributed texture-based terrain synthesis

Terrain synthesis is an important field of Computer Graphics that deals with the generation of 3D landscape models for use in virtual environments. The field has evolved to a stage where large and even infinite landscapes can be generated in realtime. However, user control of the generation process is still minimal, as well as the creation of virtual landscapes that mimic real terrain. This thesis investigates the use of texture synthesis techniques on real landscapes to improve realism and the use of sketch-based interfaces to enable intuitive user control

Interactive rendering of massive geometric models

Booklet2005-02Conference held in Pisa, ItalyTutorial notes, Eurographics Italy. Conference held in Pisa, Italy, February 17--18, CDROM Proceedings, February 200

A hybrid representation for modeling, interactive editing, and real-time visualization of terrains with volumetric features

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Terrain rendering is a crucial part of many real-time applications. The easiest way to process and visualize terrain data in real time is to constrain the terrain model in several ways. This decreases the amount of data to be processed and the amount of processing power needed, but at the cost of expressivity and the ability to create complex terrains. The most popular terrain representation is a regular 2D grid, where the vertices are displaced in a third dimension by a displacement map, called a heightmap. This is the simplest way to represent terrain, and although it allows fast processing, it cannot model terrains with volumetric features. Volumetric approaches sample the 3D space by subdividing it into a 3D grid and represent the terrain as occupied voxels. They can represent volumetric features but they require computationally intensive algorithms for rendering, and their memory requirements are high. We propose a novel representation that combines the voxel and heightmap approaches, and is expressive enough to allow creating terrains with caves, overhangs, cliffs, and arches, and efficient enough to allow terrain editing, deformations, and rendering in real time

Real-time Realistic Rendering Of Nature Scenes With Dynamic Lighting

Rendering of natural scenes has interested the scientific community for a long time due to its numerous applications. The targeted goal is to create images that are similar to what a viewer can see in real life with his/her eyes. The main obstacle is complexity: nature scenes from real life contain a huge number of small details that are hard to model, take a lot of time to render and require a huge amount of memory unavailable in current computers. This complexity mainly comes from geometry and lighting. The goal of our research is to overcome this complexity and to achieve real-time rendering of nature scenes while providing visually convincing dynamic global illumination. Our work focuses on grass and trees as they are commonly visible in everyday life. We handle geometry and lighting complexities for grass to render millions of grass blades interactively with dynamic lighting. As for lighting complexity, we address real-time rendering of trees by proposing a lighting model that handles indirect lighting. Our work makes extensive use of the current generation of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to meet the real-time requirement and to leave the CPU free to carry out other tasks

Cached Geometry Manager for View-dependent LOD Rendering

The new generation of commodity graphics cards with significant on-board video memory has become widely popular and provides high-performance rendering and flexibility. One of the features to be exploited with this hardware is the use of the on-board video memory to store geometry information. This strategy significantly reduces the data transfer overhead from sending geometry data over the (AGP) bus interface from main memory to the graphics card. However, taking advantage of cached geometry is not a trivial task because the data models often exceed the memory size of the graphics card. In this paper we present a dynamic Cached Geometry Manager (CGM) to address this issue. We show how this technique improves the performance of real-time view-dependent level-of-detail (LOD) selection and rendering algorithms of large data sets. Alternative caching approaches have been analyzed over two different view-dependent progressive mesh (VDPM) frameworks: one for rendering of arbitrary manifold 3D meshes, and one for terrain visualization