GPU-Based Visualization of Hybrid Terrain Models

Hybrid terrain models formed by a large regular mesh refined with detailed local TIN meshes represent an interesting and efficient approach for the representation of complex terrains. However, direct rendering of the component meshes would lead to overlapping geometries and discontinuities around their boundaries.The Hybrid Meshing algorithm solves this problem by generating an adaptive tessellation between the boundaries of the component meshes in real-time. In this paper, we present a highly parallel implementation of this algorithm using the Geometry Shader on the GPU.

keywords: hybrid terrain models, GPU rendering, terrain visualization, tessellation