NPAC Technical Report SCCS-689

A Design Overview of a Real-TimeTerrain Rendering Program

Alvin Leung

Submitted February 15 1995


Abstract

In this report, we provide an overview of the design of a real-time 3D terrain rendering program being developed for educational use. The terrain rendering program has four main viewing stages ranging from solar orbit to low altitude fly-by. Each stage has different viewing characteristics and data requirements. Hence, different rendering techniques, such as pixel mapping and bump mapping, are used to generate the images. These techniques are examined in detail. In addition, we briefly discuss the issues related to parallelization, data optimization and image compression.


PostScript version of the paper

Hypertext version of the paper