GRAPHICS HARDWARE-BASED ALGORITHM FOR LARGE SCALE TERRAIN RENDERING

Used the main idea of Geometry Clipmap algorithm for reference, the emphasis focused on simplification of the algorithm and improvement of the details including LOD generation, data scheduling and data clipping etc. Designed a frustum shape mesh(View-Mesh), which was transformed into a terrain mesh by sampling the height map. Implemented the data clipping by using the current View-Mesh to clip a pile of DEM data arranged irregularly. And the terrain blocks selection and sampling was finished by GPU. Experiments show that this algorithm is a unified approach to process and render DEM data and texture data, it has a few advantages including simplicity of implementation, few data limitation and eliminating the cracks phenomenon effectively(1).