Diamond terrain algorithm : continuous levels of detail for height fields : research article
Henri Hakl, Lynette van Zijl · South African Computer Journal · 2002
The generation of terrain meshes for real-time rendering of landscape data has a wide field of application ranging from military simulations and geographic information systems to flight testing and computer games. Duchaineau et al. presented a successful approach - real-time optimally adapting meshes (ROAM) - for terrain triangulation. However, the choice of geometric substructure in ROAM does not lend itself well to vertex optimizations such as triangle-strips. We present an alternative mesh representation for ROAM based on a triangle quadtree that naturally decomposes to triangle-strips. Additionally we present a new algorithm for the generation of continuous levels of detail (CLOD) for height fields that utilizes our proposed mesh representation. The algorithm is similar to ROAM in that it supports split and merge operations, but we ignore priority queueing in favor of four LIFO queues that support constant time insertion and deletion.