Flexible Generation and Lightweight View-Dependent Rendering of Terrain

The generation and real-time rendering of terrain are related problems that occur in the development of virtual reality and gaming applications. These applications must be able to create and render realistic terrains at interactive rates. In many applications it is desirable to generate unique terrains instead of reusing static geometry time and again. Finally, all applications that render large terrains must cope with selecting the correct subset or approximation of the terrain geometry to render during each frame. In this paper we describe a terrain generation and rendering system. Multiresolution shaders are used to procedurally generate terrains. An innovative subset selection algorithm is used to render terrains with very minimal CPU usage. CR Categories: I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism—Fractals; I.4.10 [Image Processing]: Image Representation—Hierarchical I.3.8 [Computer Graphics]: Applications—;