Seamless terrain rendering method based on binary tree and GPU

Abstract

In this paper a Graphic Processing Unit(GPU)-based and seamless method for terrain rendering was proposed.The method utilized binary tree to construct the terrain Level Of Detail(LOD) which was represented by row-column templates.In this method,the elevation data was transformed to elevation-texture and then the elevation-texture was used to extract elevation for rendering by Vertex Texture Fetch(VTF).And the whole process was handled by GPU so that the data accessing efficiency was greatly improved.The force-split method in Real-time Optimally Adapting Meshes(ROAM) was used in this method which solved terrain cracks by limiting the level of adjacent terrain blocks.The TriangleStrip primitive was used for terrain rendering which avoided transferring the same vertices' coordinates of adjacent triangles to GPU.Finally the paper tested the efficiency of the new method by two terrain datasets,and compared the frame rates between Clipmap and the new method.The results show that the new proposed method solves the terrain crack effectively and fulfills the demand of interactive terrain rendering.