The clipmap
Christopher C. Tanner, Christopher J. Migdal, Michael T. Jones · 1998
We describe the clipmap, a dynamic texture representation that efficiently caches textures of arbitrarily large size in a finite amount of physical memory for rendering at real-time rates.Further, we describe a software system for managing clipmaps that supports integration into demanding real-time applications.We show the scale and robustness of this integrated hardware/software architecture by reviewing an application virtualizing a 170 gigabyte texture at 60 Hertz.Finally, we suggest ways that other rendering systems may exploit the concepts underlying clipmaps to solve related problems.