Wykorzystanie procesorów graficznych do szybkiego renderingu krajobrazu sferycznego

W artykule zaprezentowano sposób generowania w czasie rzeczywistym planety o dużej powierzchni oraz wysokim poziomie szczegółowości. Algorytm opracowano na podstawie techniki wykorzystującej mapy obcięcia geometrii, umożliwiając generowanie na bieżąco dowolnego wycinka terenu na podstawie parametrów ustawienia kamery. Algorytm zaprojektowano pod kątem implementacji sprzętowej z wykorzystaniem programowalnego procesora graficznego oraz technologii CUDA.

In the paper there is presented a fast method for large and detailed spherical terrain rendering. Rendering terrain with a high degree of realism is an ongoing need in real-time computer graphics applications. To render scenes of increased sizes and complexity, several terrain rendering algorithms have been proposed in the literature. One of the recent techniques called geometry clipmaps relies on the position of the viewpoint to create multi-resolution representation of the terrain, using nested meshes. In [1] there is proposed very efficient, GPU based approach of this technique for large terrain models. In the paper there are presented techniques which combine procedural approach and geometry clipmaps together. It enables rendering an arbitrary piece of terrain on fly based on the camera parameters. To improve the algorithm efficience most computations were performed on GPU with use of vertex and pixel shaders and CUDA technology. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses the previous works, Section 3 presents the application of procedural terrein generetion based on the clipmaps and its hardware implementation, whereas the results obtained are given in Section 4. Thge conclusions are presented at the end of the paper.