Fast Rendering of Large-Scale Dynamic Multi-Layered Height Maps
Loading...
Date
2025
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
In this paper, we develop two methods for fast visualization of fully dynamic large-scale multi-layered height maps (MLHMs). MLHMs are a fairly uncommon data structure in computer graphics, which has been used as an efficient representation of 3D terrain, among other applications. Recently, a 3D hydraulic erosion simulation that utilizes this data structure effectively, allowing for real-time simulation of large scale terrain, was developed, but the fast simulation was paired with slow visualization. We extend this previous work with two efficient visualization methods. Rendering the MLHM as boxes is done using ray tracing, while a smooth surface is rendered by ray marching an implicit surface generated by smoothing the MLHM, following previous work. Both techniques are accelerated using a hierarchical data structure built directly from the MLHM, which enables quadtree-like traversal using 2D DDA, where each 2D cell contains 3D axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABBs). This data structure is adapted to accelerate ray marching by appropriately padding AABBs with the smoothing radius. We further propose a soft shadow method and geometric ambient occlusion that work in tandem with this data structure. Our visualization is fast enough to support fully dynamic terrain in real-time, where simulation, creation of our data structure and visualization are done every single frame in real-time for terrain resolutions up to 40962. For lower resolutions, it is possible to run expensive ray tracing and geometric ambient occlusion effects at full window resolution every frame with real-time or interactive frame rates.
Description
CCS Concepts: Computing methodologies->Ray tracing; Volumetric models; Real-time simulation
@inproceedings{10.2312:vmv.20251227,
booktitle = {Vision, Modeling, and Visualization},
editor = {Egger, Bernhard and Günther, Tobias},
title = {{Fast Rendering of Large-Scale Dynamic Multi-Layered Height Maps}},
author = {Nilles, Alexander Maximilian and Müller, Stefan},
year = {2025},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISBN = {978-3-03868-294-3},
DOI = {10.2312/vmv.20251227}
}