Hardware-Independent Clipmapping

Seoane,A., Taibo,J., Hernández,L., López,R., Jaspe,A.

Abstract:
We present a technique for efficient management of large textures and its real-time application to geometric models. The proposed technique is inspired by the clipmap idea, that caches in video memory a subset of the texture mipmap pyramid. Based in this concept, we define some structures and a different management allowing its implementation on a personal computer without a specific graphics hardware. Finally, we present the results of the application in a terrain visualization system, using several simultaneous textures with a detail up to 0.25 meters per texel, covering a 60,000 km2 area.