Relief mapping for urban and natural environments rendering

Terrain models typically contain huge amount of data so they are very time consuming for visualization purposes. This especially comes to the forefront when urban environments are included. The main compromise in representation of the complex environments is between achieved quality and time consumption. With the simple texture representation of complex environments we will accomplish fast application, and with the large polygonal meshes, high quality of the rendered scene. In this paper we propose rendering of urban and natural environments using parallax and relief mapping. This approach combines benefits of the rendering of polygonal meshes and texture approach. Thereby, in the proposed approach improved quality on the one side and increased speed on the other side is combined. The applicability of the method is demonstrated trough parallax and relief mapping within the Irrilicht open source graphics engine. The shaders programs were made with the GLSL shader language. As the result, the tests were made to determine the possible usage of parallax and relief mapping in the display of natural and urban environments.