BDAM - Batched dynamic adaptive meshes for high performance terrain visualization

This paper describes an efficient technique for out-of-core rendering and management of large textured terrain surfaces. The technique, called Batched Dynamic Adaptive Meshes (BDAM), is based on a paired tree structure: a tiled quadtree for texture data and a pair of bintrees of small triangular patches for the geometry. These small patches are TINs and are constructed and optimized off-line with high quality simplification and tristripping algorithms. Hierarchical view frustum culling and view-dependent texture and geometry refinement is performed at each frame through a stateless traversal algorithm. Thanks to the batched CPU/GPU communication model, the proposed technique is not processor intensive and fully harnesses the power of current graphics hardware. Both preprocessing and rendering exploit out-of-core techniques to be fully scalable and to manage large terrain datasets.