Incremental view-dependent multiresolution triangulation of terrain

Abstract

A view-dependent multiresolution triangulation algorithm is presented for a real-time fly-through. The triangulation of the terrain is generated incrementally on-the-fly during the rendering time. We show that since the view changes smoothly, only a few incremental modifications are required to update the triangulation to a new view. The resulting triangles form a multiresolution Delaunay triangulation which satisfies a predetermined view-dependent error tolerance. The presented method provides a guaranteed-quality mesh since it has control over the global geometric approximation error of the multiresolution view-dependent triangulation. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.