GPU-friendly high-quality terrain rendering

Abstract

We present a LOD rendering technique for large, textured terrain, which is well-suited for recent GPUs. In a preprocess, we tile the domain, and we compute for each tile a discrete set of LODs using a nested mesh hierarchy. This hierarchy can be encoded progressively. At run time, continuous LODs can simply be generated by interpolation of per-vertex height values on the GPU. Any mesh re-triangulation at run-time is avoided. Because the number of triangles in the mesh hierarchy is substantially decimated and by progressive transmission of vertices, our approach significantly reduces bandwidth requirements. During a typical fly-over we can guarantee extremely small pixel errors at very high frame rates.