Dynamic virtual textures

Abstract

The real-time rendering of arbitrarily large textures is a problem that has long been studied in terrain visualization. For years, different approaches have been published that have either expensive hardware requirements or other severe limitations in quality, performance or versatility. The biggest problem is usually a strong coupling between geometry and texture, both regarding database structure, as well as LOD management. This paper presents a new approach to high resolution, real-time texturing of dynamic data that avoids the drawbacks of previous techniques and offers additional possibilities. The most important benefits are: out-of-core texture visualization from dynamic data, efficient per-fragment texture LOD computation, total independence from the geometry engine, high quality filtering and easiness of integration with user custom shaders and multitexturing. Because of its versatility and independence from geometry, the proposed technique can be easily and efficiently applied to any existing terrain geometry engine in a transparent way.