Terrain rendering with unlimited detail and resolution

Abstract

The most commonly used model for terrain rendering is height map that stores elevation data on a regular grid. Whereas the distant views of a height map may look natural, the close views usually reveal its polygonal nature. As a solution to this problem, we propose to add a procedural detail and present a noise-by-example method to generate the procedural detail which reflects the geometric characteristics of the height map. It is then enhanced by what we call stamped detail. The procedural and stamped details have inherently an infinite extent. Neatly integrated with GPU tessellation, the detail-added surface can be rendered in unlimited resolutions at real-time. The efficiency of the proposed approach is proven through experiments on real data of the lunar surface.