Maximum mipmaps for fast, accurate, and scalable dynamic height field rendering

Art Tevs, Ivo Ihrke, Hans-Peter Seidel

Abstract: This paper presents a GPU-based, fast, and accurate dynamic height field rendering technique that scales well to large scale height fields. Current real-time rendering algorithms for dynamic height fields employ approximate ray-height field intersection methods, whereas accurate algorithms require pre-computation in the order of seconds to minutes and are thus not suitable for dynamic height field rendering. We alleviate this problem by using maximum mipmaps, a hierarchical data structure supporting accurate and efficient rendering while simultaneously lowering the pre-computation costs to negligible levels. Furthermore, maximum mipmaps allow for view-dependent level-of-detail rendering. In combination with hierarchical ray-stepping this results in an efficient intersection algorithm for large scale height fields.