Efficient adaptive rendering of planetary-scale terrains

Planetary-scale terrain requires adaptive simplification and tessellation for high-performance rendering. Real-world visualisation requires adaptive rendering of the world-scale geometric model, which is a challenging task especially on consumer-level notebooks. In this work, we propose a method for the adaptive rendering of the Earth's surface model using modern GPU features. The multi-resolution model is partitioned into patches and is submitted efficiently using the geometry-instancing feature for high-performance rendering. Patch-based algorithm culls world-scale model in graphics pipeline to reduce simplification and rendering load. The proposed method performs the adaptive simplification of patches with geometric-error control in image space for optimum triangulation. Simplified patches are tessellated using power-of-two tessellation factors to avoid boundary cracks. After tessellation, a three-dimensional surface is constructed by displacement mapping using a regular height data grid. Comparative evaluation of the proposed method with clipmaps and hardware-based tessellation methods is performed and results are presented.