“Geometry clipmaps: terrain rendering using nested regular grids” by Losasso and Hoppe

Rendering throughput has reached a level that enables a novel approach to level-of-detail (LOD) control in terrain rendering. We introduce the geometry clipmap, which caches the terrain in a set of nested regular grids centered about the viewer. The grids are stored as vertex buffers in fast video memory, and are incrementally refilled as the viewpoint moves. This simple framework provides visual continuity, uniform frame rate, complexity throttling, and graceful degradation. Moreover it allows two new exciting real-time functionalities: decompression and synthesis. Our main dataset is a 40GB height map of the United States. A compressed image pyramid reduces the size by a remarkable factor of 100, so that it fits entirely in memory. This compressed data also contributes normal maps for shading. As the viewer approaches the surface, we synthesize grid levels finer than the stored terrain using fractal noise displacement. Decompression, synthesis, and normal-map computations are incremental, thereby allowing interactive flight at 60 frames/sec.

1. BISHOP, L., EBERLY, D., WHITTED, T., FINCH, M., AND SHANTZ, M. 1998. Designing a PC game engine. IEEE CG&A 18(1), 46–53. Google ScholarDigital Library
2. BLOW, J. 2000. Terrain rendering at high levels of detail. Proc. 2000 Game Developers Conference.Google Scholar
3. CIGNONI, P., PUPPO, E., AND SCOPIGNO, R. 1997. Representation and visualization of terrain surfaces at variable resolution. The Visual Computer 13(5), 199–217.Google ScholarCross Ref
4. CIGNONI, P., GANOVELLI, F., GOBBETTI, E., MARTON, F., PONCHIO, F., AND SCOPIGNO, R. 2003a. BDAM — Batched dynamic adaptive meshes for high performance terrain visualization. Computer Graphics Forum 22(3).Google Scholar
5. CIGNONI, P., GANOVELLI, F., GOBBETTI, E., MARTON, F., PONCHIO, F., AND SCOPIGNO, R. 2003b. Planet-sized batched dynamic adaptive meshes (P-BDAM). IEEE Visualization 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
6. COHEN-OR, D., AND LEVANONI, Y. 1996. Temporal continuity of levels of detail in Delaunay triangulated terrain. IEEE Visualization. 37–42. Google ScholarDigital Library
7. DE FLORIANI, L, MAGILLO, P. AND PUPPO, E. 1997. Building and traversing a surface at variable resolution. IEEE Visualization 1997, 103–110. Google ScholarDigital Library
8. DOGGETT, M, AND HIRCHE, J. 2000. Adaptive view-dependent tessellation of displacement maps. Graphics Hardware Workshop, 59–66. Google ScholarDigital Library
9. DÖLLNER, J., BAUMANN, K., AND HINRICHS, K. 2000. Texturing techniques for terrain visualization. IEEE Visualization 2000, 227–234. Google ScholarDigital Library
10. DYN, N., GREGORY, J., AND LEVIN, D. 1987. A 4-point interpolatory subdivision scheme for curve design, CAGD 4, 257–268.Google ScholarDigital Library
11. DUCHAINEAU, M., WOLINSKY, M., SIGETI, D., MILLER, M., ALDRICH, C., AND MINEEV-WEINSTEIN, M. 1997. ROAMing terrain: Real-time optimally adapting meshes. IEEE Visualization 1997, 81–88. Google ScholarDigital Library
12. EL-SANA, J., AND VARSHNEY, A. 1999. Generalized view-dependent simplification. Proceedings of Eurographics 1999, 83–94.Google Scholar
13. FOURNIER, A., FUSSELL, D., AND CARPENTER, L. 1982. Computer rendering of stochastic models. Comm. of the ACM 25(6), 371–384. Google ScholarDigital Library
14. GU, X., GORTLER, S., AND HOPPE, H. Geometry images. ACM SIGGRAPH 2002, 355–361. Google ScholarDigital Library
15. GUSKOV, I., VIDIMČE, K., SWELDENS, W., ANDSCHRÖDER, P. Normal meshes. SIGGRAPH 2000, 95–102. Google ScholarDigital Library
16. GUMHOLD, S., ANDHÜTTNER, T. 1999. Multiresolution rendering with displacement mapping. Graphics Hardware Workshop 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
17. HITCHNER, L., AND MCGREEVY, M. 1993. Methods for user-based reduction of model complexity for Virtual Planetary Exploration. Proc. SPIE 1913, 622–636.Google ScholarCross Ref
18. HOPPE, H. 1998. Smooth view-dependent level-of-detail control and its application to terrain rendering. IEEE Visualization 1998, 35–42. Google ScholarDigital Library
19. HOPPE, H. 1999. Optimization of mesh locality for transparent vertex caching. ACM SIGGRAPH 1999, 269–276. Google ScholarDigital Library
20. KOBBELT, L. 1996. Interpolatory subdivision on open quadrilateral nets with arbitrary topology. Eurographics 1996, 409–420.Google Scholar
21. LEVENBERG, J. 2002. Fast view-dependent level-of-detail rendering using cached geometry. IEEE Visualization 2002, 259–266. Google ScholarDigital Library
22. LEWIS, J. 1987. Generalized stochastic subdivision. ACM Transactions on Graphics 6(3), 167–190. Google ScholarDigital Library
23. LINDSTROM, P., KOLLER, D., RIBARSKY, W., HODGES, L., FAUST, N., AND TURNER, G. 1996. Real-time, continuous level of detail rendering of height fields. ACM SIGGRAPH 1996, 109–118. Google ScholarDigital Library
24. LINDSTROM, P., AND PASCUCCI, V. 2002. Terrain simplification simplified: A general framework for view-dependent out-of-core visualization. IEEE TVCG 8(3), 239–254. Google ScholarDigital Library
25. LOSASSO, F., HOPPE, H, SCHAEFER, S., AND WARREN, J. 2003. Smooth geometry images. Symposium on Geometry Processing 2003, 138–145. Google ScholarDigital Library
26. MALVAR, H. 2000. Fast Progressive Image Coding without Wavelets. Data Compression Conference (DCC ’00), 243–252. Google ScholarDigital Library
27. MILLER, G. 1986. The definition and rendering of terrain maps. ACM SIGGRAPH 1986, 39–48. Google ScholarDigital Library
28. MOULE, K., AND MCCOOL, M. 2002. Efficient bounded adaptive tessellation of displacement maps. Graphics Interface 2002.Google Scholar
29. PAJAROLA, R. 1998. Large scale terrain visualization using the restricted quadtree triangulation. IEEE Visualization 1998, 19–26. Google ScholarDigital Library
30. RABINOVICH, B., AND GOTSMAN, C. 1997. Visualization of large terrains in resource-limited computing environments. IEEE Visualization. Google ScholarDigital Library
31. RÖTTGER, S., HEIDRICH, W., SLUSALLEK, P., AND SEIDEL, H.-P. 1998. Real-time generation of continuous levels of detail for height fields. Central Europe Conf. on Computer Graphics and Vis., 315–322.Google Scholar
32. TANNER, C., MIGDAL, C., AND JONES, M. 1998. The clipmap: A virtual mipmap. ACM SIGGRAPH 1998, 151–158. Google ScholarDigital Library
33. VLACHOS, A., PETERS, J., BOYD, C., AND MITCHELL, J. 2001. Curved PN triangles. Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, 159–166. Google ScholarDigital Library
34. WEI, L, AND LEVOY, M. Fast texture synthesis using tree-structured vector quantization. ACM SIGGRAPH 2000, 479–488. Google ScholarDigital Library
35. WAGNER, D. 2004. Terrain geomorphing in the vertex shader. In ShaderX2: Shader Programming Tips & Tricks with DirectX 9. Wordware Publishing.Google Scholar
36. WILLIAMS, L. 1983. Pyramidal parametrics. ACM SIGGRAPH. 1–11. Google ScholarDigital Library