RASTeR: Simple and Efficient Terrain Rendering on the GPU

Abstract

This paper introduces RASTeR, a GPU based LOD technique for interactive rendering of large terrains based on a paired multi-resolution tree structure. Our approach uses regular height-data blocks and terrain independent triangle patches, which are used to efficiently subdivide the terrain data. At run time, continuous LODs can simply be generated by tiling a limited set of triangle patches, the indices to which are pre-computed, over height-field blocks, thereby minimizing the amount of data to be transferred to the graphics card. RASTeR maintains a constant frame rate through asynchronous and a priori fetching of raw or compressed elevation and texture data. The efficiency of our method is validated by presenting experimental results on large elevation models.