Huge texture mapping for real-time visualization of large-scale terrain

ABSTRACT

Texture mapping greatly influences the performance of visualization in many 3D applications. Sometimes the texture data is so large that it has to be stored in slower external storage, rather than fast texture memory or host memory. In these circumstances, texture mapping becomes the performance bottleneck. In this paper, we present a compact multiresolution model, Texture Mipmap Quadtree (TMQ), to represent large-scale textures. It facilitates fast loading and pre-filtering of textures from slower external storage. Integrating continuous LOD model of terrain geometry, we present a criterion to select proper textures from TMQ according to viewing parameters during rendering stage. By exploiting temporal coherence, a dynamic texture management scheme is devised based on two-level cache hierarchy to further increase the performance of texture mapping.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.7 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
mipmap, out-of-core, real-time rendering, terrain, texture compression, texture mapping