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.