Bilkent University
Department of Computer Engineering
CS 590 SEMINAR
View-Dependent Visualization of Rich Terrain with Level-of-Detail and Parallax Mapping on GPU
Ömer Sinan Şahin
MS Student
Computer Engineering Department
Bilkent University
Real-time terrain rendering is one of the most popular topics and very active field of computer graphics. Main area of terrain rendering is visualizing a high quality terrain model not only for games but also for military simulators and Geographic Information System (GIS). The most popular approach for real-time terrain rendering is height-map based representations. The problem about these representations are that some volumetric terrain features like caves, arches, cliffs and overhangs cannot be represented because 2D grids and a single displacement map are not sufficient to store more than one vertical layer. So, instead of sampling the space in 2D, voxel-based volumetric representation can be used to sample the space in 3D so that it allows representation of complex volumetric features. However, it is not used for real-time rendering because of high memory requirements and it is very diffucult to apply efficient Level-of-Detail (LOD) techniques. With the hardware tesselation, a new feature of DirectX 11, we gain more power on graphics pipeline which is a procedure to render 3D scene to a 2D screen on GPU. Previously, number of shaders in graphics pipeline were limited but with the hardware tesselation, we are able manipulate more of these shaders which provide us oppourtunity to use GPU more efficiently. We present an efficient LOD method on GPU by using shaders in graphics pipeline in order to overcome the disadvantages of voxel-based representation while improving the performance of real-time rendering. In addition, we use parallax mapping method in order to add more realistic view by adding apparent depth to textures without increasing the performance cost.
DATE: 19 March, 2018, Monday, CS590 & CS690 presentations begin at @ 15:40
PLACE: EA-409