Design by
Jens Schöbel
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Terrain Tool
The pictures you can see belong to a tool which I created for the
Angkor Project Group.
We discussed the visualization of the Angkorian temples in realtime. For some reason I decided to
implement an algorithm developed by Lindstrom and Koller.
Unfortunately Peter Lindstrom is no longer a professor at the
Georgia Tech hence I can not link to the
proceedings. If someone sent me a link I'd be very happy.
If you want to use state-of-the-art algorithms you should visit www.vterrain.org. But be warned: the papers are very scientific and you need a good knowledge in mathematics.
Pictures
Click a picture to enlarge it in a new window.
Overview
Not Optimized
The right picture is that one that only shows lines. Do you see the difference to the left picture? ... me neither. Check the frame rate, two frames per second. That's not very much.
Optimized
Again, the right picture is the picture that only shows lines. Check the frame rate for these pictures. Now you may begin to understand why it is of such importance to find better and faster algorithms than the brute force.
By the way: don't ask me why the triangle version with error 0.5 is faster than the line version.
The Tool
Download the tool age and run the terrain tool. Only the 7z version is available. If you need another please ask me. The current version is a slight improvement of the first university version so I am not sure if the help contains all the improvements. The controls are a little bit tricky because I tried to copy the UnrealEd movement. The terrain tool runs under Windows only.
terrain tool package - (4.22 MB 7z)
Movement
- LMB and drag left or right to rotate
- LMB and drag up / down to move forward / backward
- RMB and drag to rotate view
- RMB and LMB and drag to move within the xy-plane
- ESC to end the program
- F1 draws a little help
References
[1] P. Lindstrom, D. Koller, W. Ribarsky, L. Hodges, N. Faust and G. Turner. Real-time continuous level of detail rendering of height fields. Proceedings of SIGGRAPH' 95
[2] P. Lindstrom and V. Pascucci. Visualization of large terrains made easy. IEEE Visualization 2001 Proceedings