A Height-Map Based Terrain Rendering with Tessellation Hardware

The height-map is one of the most representative ways of 3D terrain rendering. Technically, the management of level-of-detail factors is the core of height-map rendering. We have a bundle of GPU-based level-of- detail management schemes for terrain renderings, in addition to the lots of CPU-based ones. From OpenGL 4.0 and DirectX 11, the hardware tessellation features are provided to dynamically control the level-of-detail objects. Though the hardware tessellation is a promising approach for the terrain rendering, it has some drawbacks to be widely used. In this paper, we present an efficient way of applying hardware tessellation techniques to the height-map based terrain rendering. Represented as tessellation shader programs, our approach also resolved the popping and the cracking drawbacks of the generic level-of-detail terrain rendering. Our approach can be enhanced with non- uniform patches and terrain flatness factors.