We describe an efficient technique for out-of-core management and interactive rendering of planet sized textured terrain surfaces. The technique, called P-Batched Dynamic Adaptive Meshes (P-BDAM), extends the BDAM approach by using as basic primitive a general triangulation of points on a displaced triangle. The proposed framework introduces several advances with respect to the state of the art: thanks to a batched host-to-graphics communication model, we outperform current adaptive tessellation solutions in terms of rendering speed; we guarantee overall geometric continuity, exploiting programmable graphics hardware to cope with the accuracy issues introduced by single precision floating points; we exploit a compressed out of core representation and speculative prefetching for hiding disk latency during rendering of out-of-core data; we efficiently construct high quality simplified representations with a novel distributed out of core simplification algorithm working on a standard PC network.
Rendering high quality digital terrains at interactive rates requires carefully crafted algorithms and data structures able to balance the competing requirements of realism and frame rates, while taking into account the memory and speed limitations of the underlying graphics platform.In this survey, we analyze multi-resolution approaches that exploit a certain semi-regularity of the data. These approaches have produced some of the most efficient systems to date. After providing a short background and motivation for the methods, we focus on illustrating models based on tiled blocks and nested regular grids, quadtrees and triangle bin-trees triangulations, as well as cluster based approaches. We then discuss LOD error metrics and system-level data management aspects of interactive terrain visualization, including dynamic scene management, out-of-core data organization and compression, as well as numerical accuracy.
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