Abstract
Terrain rendering is a crucial part of many real-time applications. The easiest way to process and visualize terrain data in real time is to constrain the terrain model in several ways. This decreases the amount of data to be processed and the amount of processing power needed, but at the cost of expressivity and the ability to create complex terrains. The most popular terrain representation is a regular 2D grid, where the vertices are displaced in a third dimension by a displacement map, called a heightmap. This is the simplest way to represent terrain, and although it allows fast processing, it cannot model terrains with volumetric features. Volumetric approaches sample the 3D space by subdividing it into a 3D grid and represent the terrain as occupied voxels. They can represent volumetric features but they require computationally intensive algorithms for rendering, and their memory requirements are high. We propose a novel representation that combines the voxel and heightmap approaches, and is expressive enough to allow creating terrains with caves, overhangs, cliffs, and arches, and efficient enough to allow terrain editing, deformations, and rendering in real time.
Highlights
The most popular terrain representations are based on heightmaps, which usually define the terrain surface as a regular grid on a 2D plane
We propose a novel representation that combines the voxel and heightmap approaches, and is expressive enough to allow creating terrains with caves, overhangs, cliffs, and arches, and efficient enough to allow terrain editing, deformations, and rendering in real time
We propose a hybrid terrain representation that combines voxel- and heightmap-based approaches
Summary
The most popular terrain representations are based on heightmaps, which usually define the terrain surface as a regular grid on a 2D plane. To deal with the issues mentioned above, many real-time applications model volumetric features as separate 3D meshes and place them on relevant parts of the terrain. Because these meshes do not seamlessly blend into the terrain, various tricks are used to conceal artifacts where the model and mesh meet, such as placing rocks at the entrance of a cave. We propose a terrain representation that can uniformly model elevation data and volumetric features in realtime applications to create a surface terrain, which is able to represent the artifacts such as caves, overhangs, and cliffs. These features are not add-ons but rather they are modeled as part of the terrain itself
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More From: International Journal of Geographical Information Science
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