Interactive Out-of-core Visualization of Very Large Landscapes on Commodity Graphics Platforms

We recently introduced an efficient technique for out-of-core rendering and management of large textured landscapes. The technique, called Batched Dynamic Adaptive Meshes (BDAM), is based on a paired tree structure: a tiled quadtree for texture data and a pair of bintrees of small triangular patches for the geometry. These small patches are TINs that are constructed and optimized off-line with high quality simplification and tristripping algorithms. Hierarchical view frustum culling and view-dependent texture/geometry refinement is performed at each frame with a stateless traversal algorithm that renders a continuous adaptive terrain surface by assembling out of core data. Thanks to the batched CPU/GPU communication model, the proposed technique is not processor intensive and fully harnesses the power of current graphics hardware. This paper summarizes the method and discusses the results obtained in a virtual fly-through over a textured digital landscape derived from aerial imaging.

@InCollection{CGGMPS03,
  author       = {Cignoni, P. and Ganovelli, F. and Gobbetti, E. and Marton, F. and Ponchio, F. and Scopigno, R.},
  title        = {Interactive Out-of-core Visualization of Very Large Landscapes on Commodity Graphics Platforms},
  booktitle    = {International Conference on Virtual Storytelling},
  volume       = {2897},
  pages        = {21--29},
  month        = {november},
  year         = {2003},
  editor       = {Olivier Balet and Gerard Subsol and Patrice Torguet},
  publisher    = {Springer Verlag},
  note         = {isbn = {3-540-20535-7},  Proc. Second International Conference, ICVS 2003, Toulouse, France, November 20-21, 2003, Proceedings},
  keywords     = {Terrain, TCR, MR},
  url          = {https://publications.crs4.it/pubdocs/2003/CGGMPS03},
}