GPU-only terrain rendering for walk-through

Abstract

Accurate terrain representation takes a very significant role in making a scene more realistic. In this paper, we present a full GPU-based real-time terrain rendering algorithm by ray-casting. Since it requires no geometrical structure like a polygonal mesh, it doesn't need any LOD (Level-Of-Detail) policies. Most of them are processed on CPU and may give much burden on the CPU. As a result, it enhances the whole performance of the system. Our method grants a complete freedom to the view point and its direction, so objects can move around so freely in the air or on the surface that it can be directly applied to any computer games and VR (Virtual Reality) system. To better the rendering quality, we applied curved patches to the height field. On the way, we suggest a simplification for evaluating a ray-patch intersection. We implemented all the processes on GPU, and obtained tens to hundreds of frame rates with a variety of resolutions of height maps: 256×256∼8192×8192 (texel 2).