A review of real-time terrain rendering techniques

Terrain rendering is used widely in many 3D applications, such as virtual reality applications, 3D games, flight simulators and geological visualization programs. Most of those require terrains to be rendered at interactive rates, so a lot of researches on real-time terrain rendering have been done. This review provides an introduction to various contemporary real-time techniques for terrain rendering. These techniques are classified into two categories: the techniques based on polygon-models and the ones based on voxel models. Each category is introduced in a main section. In each section, corresponding modeling, texture mapping and lighting methods are involved. In the last section, some directions of future work are given.