Real-time Dynamic Terrain Rendering Based On GPU

With the rapid development of computer technology, especially the maturity of simulation technology, terrain visualization has a wide range of applications in 3D GIS, battlefield simulation and virtual reality, and real-time dynamic terrain rendering is the hot topic in terrain visualization research.Based on digital elevation model as a data source, this paper first analysis the related technology and theory of terrain visualization, studies the existing multi-resolution terrain rendering algorithm and expounds their respective advantages, disadvantages and applicability in dynamic terrain. And next the Geometry Clipmaps algorithm has been extended to suit for real-time dynamic terrain rendering. A new clipmaps updating mode has been proposed for the original updating mode may cause the duplicate updating and simplifies crack elimination algorithm to improve the utilization of the system. Then, against the particularity of dynamic terrain and to solve the contradiction between high fidelity and real-time, a GPU-based strategy for terrain deformation has been proposed. When terrain deformation occurs, calculates the terrain deformation variables based on real physical model and updates the topological structure of the terrain in real time. In addition, in order to make the deformation more realistic, the procedural texture mapping is introduced to simulate the change of the non geometric properties of terrain. Finally, to verify the feasibility of the proposed method, simulate the crater effect on the grass under different situations. The experimental results show that the improved Geometry Clipmaps algorithm can be better applied to real-time dynamic terrain rendering. The proposed dynamic terrain rendering method based on GPU in this paper can get more realistic terrain simulation effect. Also, due to the transformation of large amount of terrain data storage and computation from CPU to GPU, the efficiency of real-time simulation has been improved and satisfy the requirements of real-time and high fidelity in dynamic terrain rendering.