A novel method for dynamic surface modeling and real-time rendering

Abstract

Rapid surface construction for rendering with on-demand precision is essential to 3D geographic information science (GIS). High accuracy surface modeling (HASM) method can construct surface with high accuracy. However, due to its slow speed, it can't be applied to 3D GIS and real-time rendering. To meet this goal, an efficient algorithm for HASM running on GPU has been presented. Fully utilizing the GPU computing power, this method has a high efficiency and can be adapted to real-time simulation and 3D rendering. Then, we combined the high performance simulation method with an efficient rendering method, so that dynamic surface simulation and real-time rendering can be integrated in the same framework and carried out concurrently. In this framework, we simulated the coarse terrain on demand and then posted it for rendering. Preconditioned conjugate gradients method is used to solve the huge linear systems arising from HASM. As for the rendering method, we made use of state-of-the-art GPU techniques such as vertex buffer object, texture buffer so that the rendering could be carried out with high efficiency. Thus, through fully harnessing the computing power of modern GPUs with multiprocessors and many stream processors, we can execute surface modeling and rendering concurrently and efficiently. Test results show our method can construct surface dynamically and visualize it at a high frame rates and allows for high quality visualization.