"ROAMing Terrain: Real-time Optimally Adapting Meshes"

by Mark Duchaineau, LLNL, Murray Wolinsky, LANL, David E. Sigeti, LANL, Mark C. Miller, LLNL, Charles Aldrich, LANL, Mark B. Mineev-Weinstein, LANL

Abstract:

Terrain visualization is a difficult problem for applications requiring accurate images of large datasets at high frame rates, such as flight simulation and ground-based aircraft testing using synthetic sensor stimulation. On current graphics hardware, the problem is to maintain dynamic, view-dependent triangle meshes and texture maps that produce good images at the required frame rate. We present an algorithm for constructing triangle meshes that optimizes flexible view-dependent error metrics, produces guaranteed error bounds, achieves specified triangle counts directly, and uses frame-to-frame coherence to operate at high frame rates for thousands of triangles per frame.

Our method, dubbed Real-time Optimally Adapting Meshes (ROAM), uses two priority queues to drive split and merge operations that maintain continuous triangulations built from pre-processed bintree triangles. We introduce two additional performance optimizations: incremental triangle stripping and priority-computation deferral lists. ROAM execution time is proportionate to the number of triangle changes per frame, which is typically a few percent of the output mesh size, hence ROAM performance is insensitive to the resolution and extent of the input terrain. Dynamic terrain and simple vertex morphing are supported. The paper can be downloaded in: [PostScript] [PDF] [Gzipped Tar].
Last modified: October 19, 1997

For more information about the technical content of these pages, contact:

duchaine@llnl.gov -- Mark Duchaineau

For information about the construction of these pages, contact:

jjperra@llnl.gov -- Joanne J. Perra

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