Real-time visualization of tire tracks in large scale dynamic terrain

In off-road simulation, the terrain is being modified as a result of its interaction with the vehicles. Previous methods just deal with relatively small scale terrain inputs. In this paper we describe a large scale dynamic terrain visualization method. The potentially visible portion of the terrain is cached in the form of texture arrays and is rendered from the GPU. The terrain deformation is generated in the fragment shader using the GPU-based terrain deformation algorithm. The deformed terrain heightmap texture is rendered to the corresponding layer in the texture array by the Framebuffer object extension. The CPU sends tiled quadtree flat grid, which was displaced by fetching the heights stored in the GPU Cache. The GPU cache is updated continuously as the viewpoint changes. Experimental results showed that the method is very efficient and suitable for applications of massive terrain tire tracks deformation.