Title: Efficient adaptive rendering of planetary-scale terrains

Authors: Zafar Masood; Zheng Jiangbin; Muhammad Irfan; Idress Ahmad

Addresses: School of Software, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China ' School of Software, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China ' School of Software, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China ' Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan

Abstract: Planetary-scale terrain requires adaptive simplification and tessellation for high-performance rendering. Real-world visualisation requires adaptive rendering of the world-scale geometric model, which is a challenging task especially on consumer-level notebooks. In this work, we propose a method for the adaptive rendering of the Earth's surface model using modern GPU features. The multi-resolution model is partitioned into patches and is submitted efficiently using the geometry-instancing feature for high-performance rendering. Patch-based algorithm culls world-scale model in graphics pipeline to reduce simplification and rendering load. The proposed method performs the adaptive simplification of patches with geometric-error control in image space for optimum triangulation. Simplified patches are tessellated using power-of-two tessellation factors to avoid boundary cracks. After tessellation, a three-dimensional surface is constructed by displacement mapping using a regular height data grid. Comparative evaluation of the proposed method with clipmaps and hardware-based tessellation methods is performed and results are presented.

Keywords: real-time graphics; level-of-detail; adaptive simplification; hardware acceleration; geographic information systems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2023.132398

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2023 Vol.71 No.4, pp.286 - 295

Received: 06 May 2022
Received in revised form: 19 Jul 2022
Accepted: 22 Jul 2022
Published online: 19 Jul 2023 *

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