High‐performance virtual globe GPU terrain rendering using game engine

Abstract

Virtual globes render planetary-scale terrain and have limited support for 3D applications development. Game engines provide development environment for interactive 3D applications development and have limited support for world-scale terrain rendering. The game engine based terrain rendering methods lacks hardware based tessellation for high-performance. This work presents a novel method for a high-performance large-scale terrain rendering for high-fidelity display systems using game engine. The proposed method performs patch-based hierarchical culling of a multi-resolution terrain model to reduce rendering load. A view-based algorithm simplifies the patches with error control on GPU. Simplified patches are efficiently submitted for drawing using indirect mesh instancing feature of game engine. The proposed method utilizes hardware tessellation feature for high-performance model tessellation and accurate earth's surface construction using displacement mapping. The proposed method is evaluated by rendering scenes for high-quality output on consumer-level hardware. Flights are performed with various settings and results are compared with clipmap-based and state-of-the-art hardware tessellation based adaptive methods. The proposed method achieved 750, 575, and 540 frames-per-second for HD, full-HD, and ultra-HD display resolutions.