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Terrain
visualization is one of the most fascinating and interesting fields
in computer graphics. Although its application areas are endless and
a significant amount of research has gone into modeling and
rendering of terrain, it remains one of the most challenging problem
areas.
For realistic representation of terrain, millions of triangles are
required. Such detail easily overwhelms even state of the art
systems, which can not cope with the huge numbers of polygons needed
to represent detailed terrain. Bottlenecks occur primarily in the
geometry part of the graphics pipeline.
An even greater challenge is the proper texturing of the terrain. In
order to recognize areas of the landscape, unique textures revealing
local features (cliffs, fields, houses) are needed. These typically
occupy several gigabytes and overload the system memory.
The focus of this project is the development of a terrain engine
which addresses these problems, employing specialized optimization
methods, procedural generation algorithms for nature
simulation, infinite terrain and algorithms to
allow “low-end” computers with 3D capabilities to visualize high
complexity landscapes at interactive frame rates. |
