BDAM - Batched Dynamic Adaptive Meshes for High Performance Terrain Visualization

Abstract

This paper describes an efficient technique for out-of-core rendering and management of large textured terrainsurfaces. 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 smallpatches are TINs and are constructed and optimized off-line with high quality simplification and tristrippingalgorithms. Hierarchical view frustum culling and view-dependent texture and geometry refinement is performedat each frame through a stateless traversal algorithm. Thanks to the batched CPU/GPU communication model,the proposed technique is not processor intensive and fully harnesses the power of current graphics hardware.Both preprocessing and rendering exploit out-of-core techniques to be fully scalable and to manage large terraindatasets.Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture and Image Generation;I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism.