SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ASPECTS OF OUT-OF-CORE DATA MANAGEMENT FOR PLANETARY TERRAIN
Cody J. White, Sergiu M. Dascalu, Frederick C. Harris, Jr. · 2011
Rendering terrain on a planetary scale can quickly become a large problem. Many challenges arise when attempting to render terrain over a spherical body as well as deal with the large amount of data that needs to be used to accurately display the terrain of a planet. Most research in the area of terrain rendering is specific to a given region of a planet, therefore needing few datasets for a proper rendering. However, since planets are made up of larger areas, a different approach needs to be taken in order to display high-detail terrain around a viewer while sorting through the large amount of planetary data available. Additionally, since modern desktops have a relatively small amount of memory, a system to swap data from the hard drive into graphics processing unit (GPU) memory must be created. Therefore, we present the software design for a data caching mechanism which can efficiently swap only the data around a viewer into and out of the GPU memory in real-time. We also present a prototype of the software which achieves efficient framerates for high-quality views of a planet’s surface while minimizing the time it takes to find data centered around a viewer and display it to the screen.