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Diploma and Master Theses (authored and supervised):

A. Frühstück:
"GPU based Clipmaps";
Supervisor: W. Purgathofer, R.F. Tobler; Institut für Computergraphik und Algorithmen, TU Wien, 2008; final examination: 2008-04-23.



English abstract:
Terrain rendering has a wide range of applications. It is used in cartography and landscape planning as well as in the entertainment sector. Applications that have to render large terrain are facing the challenge of handling a vast amount of source data. The size of such terrain data exceeds the capabilities of current PCs by far. In this work an improved terrain rendering technique is introduced. It allows the rendering of surfaces with an arbitrary basis like the spherical-shaped earth. Our algorithm extends the Geometry Clipmaps algorithm, a technique that allows to render very large terrain data without losing performance. This algorithm was developed by Losasso and Hoppe in 2004. Asirvatham and Hoppe improved this algorithm in 2005 by increasing the utilization of modern graphics hardware. Nevertheless both algorithms lack of the ability to render large curved surfaces. Our application overcomes this restriction by using a texture holding 3D points instead of a heightmap. This enables our implementation to render terrain that resides on an arbitrary basis. The created mesh is not bound by a regular grid mesh that can only be altered in z-direction. The drawback of this change of the original geometry clipmap algorithm is the introduction of a precision problem that restricts the algorithm to render only a limited area. This problem is handled by patching the whole surface with individual acting, geometry clipmap quads.


Electronic version of the publication:
http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_168305.pdf


Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.