A Design Overview of a Real-time Terrain Rendering Program

In this report, we provide an overview of the design of a real-time 3D terrain rendering program being developed for educational use. The terrain rendering program has four main viewing stages ranging from solar orbit to low altitude fly-by. Each stage has different viewing characteristics and data requirements. Hence, different rendering techniques, such as pixel mapping and bump mapping, are used to generate the images. These techniques are examined in detail. In addition, we briefly discuss the issues related to parallelization, data optimization and image compression. 1 Introduction The goal of this terrain rendering project is to provide the user a real time interactive viewing environment for the available terrain data. We envision that the user starts out in the solar system, where Mars, Earth and Venus are visible. Then the user chooses to visit one of the three planets. This journey can be broken into four main viewing stages: stage one, from solar orbit to high planetary orb..