Real-time visualization of tire tracks in dynamic terrain with LOD

Abstract

In off-road simulation, the terrain is being modified as a result of its interaction with the vehicles. Previous methods dealing with tire tracks are to animate tire tracks and have no interactivity. In this paper, we describe a method to render tire tracks in dynamic terrain. In the base of hierarchical structure for terrain LOD, hierarchical structure starts at a resolution sufficient to represent the initial terrain, and then increases the resolution wherever necessary at the modified terrain regions. To avoid the cracks at the boundary between terrain cells, which are modified and increased the resolution, an algorithm based on window-scanning avoids cracks between neighboring cells in the 2×2 window is given. This algorithm avoids the transfer of cracks effectively through guaranteeing the results after window scanning will not impact the edges processed previously. The results of experiments show that not only this algorithm avoids crack effectively, but also the cost of computing is very low. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.