Geometry Clipmaps Terrain Rendering Using Hardware Tessellation

Abstract

Due to heavy rendering load and unstable frame rate when rendering large terrain, this paper proposes a geometry clipmaps based algorithm. Triangle meshes are generated by few tessellation control points in GPU tessellation shader. ‘Cracks’ caused by different resolution between adjacent levels are eliminated by modifying outer tessellation level factor of shared edges between levels. Experimental results show the algorithm is able to improve rendering efficiency and frame rate stability in terrain navigation.