High-performance navigation and rendering of very-large scale landscape and seascape

With fast development of graphics hardware, the current algorithms on rendering of landscape and seascape, which are focused on precise view-frustum culling and complicated decision of level of detail (LOD), lead the CPU to be the bottleneck of system. This paper presents a new framework based on some new data structures and new rendering algorithms for navigation and rendering of very large-scale landscape and seascape. Firstly, we construct a new terrain data model, which consists of terrain tile pyramid and terrain summary pyramid. Secondly, in order to stitch the terrain tile boundaries seamlessly, the index template is introduced, and an algorithm of LOD based on "remarkability" is described in detail. Finally, Perlin noise is used to simulate the ocean surface and a framework of navigation of very large-scale scene is completed. Experimental results show that this system can satisfy the requirements of real-time navigation of large-scale landscape and seascape.