Texturing techniques for terrain visualization

Presents a new rendering technique for processing multiple multi-resolution textures of LOD (level-of-detail) terrain models and describes its application to interactive, animated terrain content design. The approach is based on a multi-resolution model for terrain texture which cooperates with a multi-resolution model for terrain geometry. For each texture layer, an image pyramid and a texture tree are constructed. Multiple texture layers can be associated with one terrain model and can be combined in different ways, e.g. by blending and masking. The rendering algorithm simultaneously traverses the multi-resolution geometry model and the multi-resolution texture model, and takes into account geometric and texture approximation errors. It uses multi-pass rendering and exploits multi-texturing to achieve real-time performance. Applications include interactive texture lenses, texture animation and topographic textures. These techniques offer an enormous potential for developing new visualization applications for presenting, exploring and manipulating spatio-temporal data.