“Robust Rendering of High Resolution Terrain”
Abstract:
Rendering photorealistic terrains is a challenge in several ways. The renderer must robustly handle detail levels from small boulders to entire planets, sometimes even within a single frame. It must handle surfaces that are displaced very heavily by shaders and allow the artists a large degree of control over them. Lastly, it must be able to output highly detailed images and animations with potentially very large amounts of motion blur, all at film resolution.
This sketch presents the foundation of a terrain rendering system that has been used in feature films such as Star Trek: Nemesis and The Missing. Features include a novel texture antialiasing solution, efficient motion blur rendering, automatic triangle-level LOD integrated with a modular shader architecture.
References:
COOK, R. L. 1984. Shade trees. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1984, ACM Press / ACM SIGGRAPH, H. Christiansen, Ed., ACM.
PERLIN, K. 1985. An image synthesizer. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1985, ACM Press / ACM SIGGRAPH, B. A. Barsky,Ed., ACM.
