LOD-sprite technique for accelerated terrain rendering

  • Authors:

  • Baoquan Chen;J. Edward Swan, II;Eddy Kuo;Arie Kaufman

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY;Virtual Reality Laboratory, Naval Research Laboratory Code 5580, 4555 Overlook Ave SW, Washington, DC;Virtual Reality Laboratory, Naval Research Laboratory Code 5580, 4555 Overlook Ave SW, Washington, DC;Department of Computer Science, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY

  • Venue:
  • VIS '99 Proceedings of the conference on Visualization '99: celebrating ten years
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

We present a new rendering technique, termed LOD-sprite rendering, which uses a combination of a level-of-detail (LOD) representation of the scene together with reusing image sprites (previously rendered images). Our primary application is accelerating terrain rendering. The LOD-sprite technique renders an initial frame using a high-resolution model of the scene geometry. It renders subsequent frames with a much lower-resolution model of the scene geometry and texture-maps each polygon with the image sprite from the initial high-resolution frame. As it renders these subsequent frames the technique measures the error associated with the divergence of the view position from the position where the initial frame was rendered. Once this error exceeds a user-defined threshold, the technique re-renders the scene from the high-resolution model. We have efficiently implemented the LOD-sprite technique with texture-mapping graphics hardware. Although to date we have only applied LOD-sprite to terrain rendering, it could easily be extended to other applications. We feel LOD-sprite holds particular promise for real-time rendering systems.