A View-dependent Multi-resolution Terrain Simplification Based on Adaptive Quadtrees
Xianyong Zhang · Acta Simulata Systematica Sinica · 2002
Terrain rendering is widely used in Games, VR, Simulation, GIS, etc. We present a simple and rapid algorithm of real-time multi-resolution terrain rendering with high resolution texture mapping. It uses view-dependent level-of-details (LOD) algorithm to simplify the DEM terrain. The LOD mesh is based on adaptive Quadtree, which can generate successive LOD to eliminate crack between different LOD. The view direction and surface coarse are considered in the error metric which is used to decide LOD refinement. We use vertex morphing to smooth LOD translation to reduce the image popping and maintain constant frame rate. An approach of multi-resolution texture mapping is proposed to reduce the texture memory space and selects an appropriate texture resolution based on the terrain geometry LOD. We have efficiently implemented the algorithm and acquire a good tradeoff between image quality and real-time rendering.