Real-time tessellation of terrain on graphics hardware

Synthetic terrain is a key element in many applications that can lessen the sense of realism if it is not handled correctly. We propose a new technique for visualizing terrain surfaces by tessellating them on the GPU. The presented algorithm introduces a new adaptive tessellation scheme for managing the level of detail of the terrain mesh, avoiding the appearance of t-vertices that can produce visually disturbing artifacts. Previous solutions exploited the Geometry Shader capabilities to tessellate meshes from scratch. In contrast, we reuse the already calculated data to minimise the operations performed in the shader units. These features allow us to increase performance through smart refining and coarsening.