Real-time Optimally Adapting Meshes

As the simple OpenGL viewer page eluded to, DTM datasets contain a lot of data. Therefore visualising the data at high frame rates, for example in a flight simulation, can cause a number of problems. One of the main issues is maintaining dynamic, view-dependent triangle meshes and texture maps that produce good images at higher frame rates.

One successful method for overcoming these issues is ROAMing Terrain: Real-time Optimally Adapting Meshes, proposed by M. Duchaineau et al. This solution concentrates on the areas of level-of-detail for the geometry, culling to the view frustum and triangle stripping.

The figure below shows an example of ROAM terrain with and without visible mesh edges.

Example of ROAM terrain.

The figure below shows the triangulation for the example frame above, with the eye looking right. The dark regions are outside the view frustum, the light regions are inside, and the mid-grey regions overlap the boundaries.

Triangulation for the example frame.

From the figure above, it is possible to see areas of triangle strips. By also culling the mesh that is outside the view seen by the user significant performance improvements are made over a standard grid mesh.

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