Quadtree Displacement Mapping with Height Blending
Michał Drobot · 2018
This chapter provides an overview and compares surface rendering techniques, and addresses a novel approach outperforming existing solutions in terms of performance, memory usage, and multilayer blending. It focuses on various view and light-dependant visual clues important for correct surface rendering such as displacement mapping, self-shadowing with approximate penumbra shadows, ambient occlusion, and surface correct texture blending, while allowing real-time surface changes. The chapter presents a state-of-the-art algorithm yielding higher accuracy with very good performance, scaling well with large height fields. It makes use of empty space skipping techniques and utilizes texture mip levels for height quadtree storage, which can be prepared at render time. The chapter discusses level-of-detail technique which allows higher performance and quality for minification. It also focuses on surface blending methods, proposing a new method that exhibits better resemblance to real life and allows aggressive optimization during blended height-field displacement mapping.