Large-scale virtual texturing on a distributed rendering system

There has been a profound interest of late in the digitization and reconstruction of historical monuments. Rendering massive monument models requires a cluster of workstations because of the computational infeasibility of rendering over a single machine. Moreover, interactive rendering of these massive models in an immersive environment is only possible over a cluster of machines. In this paper, we present a design of distributed rendering system to efficiently handle models with massive textures. A server holds the skeleton of the whole model and divides the screen space balancing the rendering load among multiple clients. Each client loads only the required geometry and textures to render its sub-scene. We present a virtual texturing method for handling massive textures over the distributed rendering system. These textures are combined into a texture atlas which is split into equally sized tiles. A virtual texture is built over this atlas with each pixel representing a tile in the atlas. An efficient caching module loads only the required tiles into the memory, that are identified using the virtual texture. A fragment shader uses the virtual texture as a mapping to the physical texture in memory to generate the fragments. We demonstrate the performance of our system over a 350M triangles and 500 gigapixel textured model of Vittala temple.