An Application Of Visual Terrain Simulation In Vega

The studies of visual terrain have been an active field in the three-dimensional visual simulation for many years. How to render the terrain models with high quality in real time is the key point in this study area. In addition, the management of mass data when displaying large-scale terrains is another difficult aspect in the area. Vega, as a modern tool, has been widely used to develop the three dimensional simulation applications. Because the structure of terrain database and the algorithms to deal with the terrain models have some limitations, the terrain models in Vega, however, are not quite suitable for some special applications.In order to improve the quality of visual terrains in Vega we introduce a view dependent LOD algorithm to construct a simplified and multi-resolution terrain model in this paper. This algorithm uses the model vertex based view culling, which can greatly reduce the number of triangles in a terrain model and geomorphing technology, which smoothes the model transition from one level to another. Moreover we use a multi-level and tiled structure to manage the mass data and a multi-view dependent algorithm to support multi-view application and multithread to resolve frame delay. At last we implement this algorithm in a Vega model using the Vega extension.