Per-pixel rendering of terrain data

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to terrain rendering, which mostly relies on GPU/shader rather than CPU. The most popular representation for terrain data is uniformly sampled height field. As the height field is stored as a texture map, it is directly accessible by a pixel shader. The pixel shader uses a ray casting algorithm, and the CPU and the vertex shader provide ray information to be passed to the pixel shader. Then, the pixel shader samples the ray, computes the intersection of the ray and the terrain surface, and finally determines the pixel color. The experimental results show the feasibility of the shader-intensive approach to real-time terrain rendering. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.