Hexagonal LOD for Interactive Terrain Rendering

In this paper we present a novel abstraction layer above the well-known triangular 1-to-4 split subdivision based on hexagons. This approach allows adaptive bidirectional subdivision, that is refinement and coarsening of the mesh, without causing problems like irregular refinement or hanging nodes. Thus it is feasible to adapt the mesh resolution locally, according to geometric features, viewing parameters and error bounds. Our method does neither rely on time-consuming preprocessing nor hierarchical data structures, which yields to low memory consumption. We show, how our technique can be applied to terrain rendering of huge data sets, where we achieve interactive frame rates using hexagonal subdivision.