ROAMing terrain: real-time optimally adapting meshes

Terrain visualization is a difficult problem for applications requiring accurate images of large datasets at high frame rates, such as flight simulation and ground-based aircraft testing using synthetic sensor stimulation. On current graphics hardware, the problem is to maintain dynamic, view-dependent triangle meshes and texture maps that produce good images at the required frame rate. We present an algorithm for constructing triangle meshes that optimizes flexible view-dependent error metrics, produces guaranteed error bounds, achieves specified triangle counts directly, and uses frame-to-frame coherence to operate at high frame rates for thousands of triangles per frame. Our method, dubbed Real-time Optimally Adapting Meshes (ROAM), uses two priority queues to drive split and merge operations that maintain continuous triangulations built from preprocessed bintree triangles. We introduce two additional performance optimizations: incremental triangle stripping and prioritycomputa...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: VISUALIZATION
• Authors: Mark A. Duchaineau, Murray Wolinsky, David E. Sigeti, Mark C. Miller, Charles Aldrich, Mark B. Mineev-Weinstein
• Keywords: Frame Rates, Triangle, Triangle Meshes, Visualization, VISUALIZATION 1997