View-Dependent Real-Time Rendering of Large Outdoor Scenes

A new real-time point-based rendering method of large outdoor scenes is presented. Based on our interactive subdivide method, polygonal trees and other vegetation were converted to point-based models, and then different level of details of trees and other vegetation were created using hierarchical clustering. Different level of details of terrain were created using diamond tree backbone of ROAM2.0 method. Therefore, trees and other vegetation were rendered using point-based method on GPU and terrain was rendered using triangle based method. A compromise between terrain rendering performance and plant rendering quality was made to achieve ideal visual effect. By our method, the rendering primitive decreased and the fidelity of outdoor scenes was kept. Experiments show that our hybrid rendering method could render large outdoor scenes in real-time.