Terrain Rendering Techinques

widely used != good

ROAM is a relatively complicated algorithm when you compare it to others. This just means more bugs to track down, and you need to do a bajillion things to get the frame rate to not suck.

I'd try Geometry clipmaps.

Other algorithms can be found at: http://vterrain.org/LOD/Papers/index.html

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Original post by ngill ROAM is a relatively complicated algorithm when you compare it to others.

Humm do u imply that ROAM is the better option when compared to Quadtree ?

Quote:

Original post by ngill I'd try Geometry clipmaps. Other algorithms can be found at: http://vterrain.org/LOD/Papers/index.html

Thanks for the link ..... I will definitely look into these latest techniques.

Regards,
Hussain

i think you cannot compare quadtrees with roam. i mean quadtrees is a data structure, roam is more than just a binary tree. roam is also the technique where you work with a split and a merge queue. you can also do roam with a quadtree instead of a binary tree. roam 2.0 even makes use of a quadtree i think. in my opinion roam 2.0 is still the best technique if you are a good programmer, but it is really not simple to implement if you want to try it out yourself and not just copy and paste.

often it is said that roam is too cpu intensive, i do not think so, because it can also be used with patches like in geomipmapping. one advantage is that you do not have to worry about lod differences between two neighbouring patches, because this cannot happen with roam if you correctly use force splits.

the most impressive demonstration i have seen so far was the one of roam 2.0

Quote:

Original post by kudi i think you cannot compare quadtrees with roam. i mean quadtrees is a data structure, roam is more than just a binary tree. roam is also the technique where you work with a split and a merge queue.

Thanks kudi. Yeah definitely I was wrong in my statement of comparing ROAM with Quadtree. I am going through the various techniques mentioned at

http://vterrain.org/LOD/Papers/index.html

I will definitely post my findings when am done reading the stuff.

Regards,
Hussain.

Quote:

Original post by kudi the most impressive demonstration i have seen so far was the one of roam 2.0

Where can I download a demo, what was impressive about it?

it has high polygon count, what i think is the most difficult part in terrain rendering:

http://www.cognigraph.com/ROAM_homepage/ROAM2/roam40postcard.html

actually i dont know if it is still impressive, it is not new, but todays demos often dont run anymore on my laptop, but have lower qulity as i can see on movies. ok, perhaps clipmaps could be a better solution.

I would start with geomipmapping. It's method of simplifying the terrain might not be the most representative of the real shape, but it's incredibly easy to implement and very hardware friendly. All of the data can be precomputed so there isn't much of a processor overhead on it.

Hi,

Take a look at the geometry clipmap papers (link given in the first reply) it's really not complicated to implement, and probably one of the most hardware friendly method I know.
Even without all the compression / decompression parts of the paper, you can render a 4096x4096 heightmap without any problem (did that in only 2 days ... ok, so far I don't use any texture, but it still runs at 150+FPS with the Debug version of DirectX ^^)

.:: Paic Citron ::.

I used this for private project:

http://users.belgacom.net/gc610902/

I really like it.