Real-time View-dependent Triangulation of Infinite Ray Cast Terrain

Sammanfattning: Background. Ray marching is a technique that can be used to render images of infinite terrains defined by a height field by sampling consecutive points along a ray until the terrain surface is intersected. However, this technique can be expensive, and does not generate a mesh representation, which may be useful in certain use cases. Objectives. The aim of the thesis is to implement an algorithm for view-dependent triangulation of infinite terrains in real-time without making use of any preprocessed data, and compare the performance and visual quality of the implementation with that of a ray marched solution. Methods. Performance metrics for both implementations are gathered and compared. Rendered images from both methods are compared using an image quality assessment algorithm. Results. In all tests performed, the proposed method performs better in terms of frame rate than a ray marched version. The visual similarity between the two methods highly depend on the quality setting of the triangulation. Conclusions. The proposed method can perform better than a ray marched version, but is more reliant on CPU processing, and can suffer from visual popping artifacts as the terrain is refined.