Real time city visualization
Isaac Besora Vilardaga · 2011
The visualization of cities in real time has a lot of potential applications, from urban and emergency planning, to driving simulators and entertain-ment. The massive amount of data and the computational requirements needed to render an entire city in detail are the reason why a lot of tech-niques have been proposed in this field. Procedural city generation, building simplification and visibility processing are some of the approaches used to solve a small subset of the problems that these applications need to face. Our work proposes a new city rendering algorithm that is a radically different ap-proach to what has been done before in this field. The proposed technique is based on a structuration of the city data in a regular grid which is traversed, at runtime, by a ray tracing algorithm that keeps track of visible parts of the scene. As a preprocess, a set of quads defining the buildings of a city is transformed to the regular grid used by our algorithm. The rendering algorithm uses this