Cozzi Patrick, Ring Kevin. 3D Engine Design for Virtual Globes

CRC Press Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. — 514 p
You are given a quality tutorial about globe and terrain rendering; the details about real-time 3D rendering of high-precision data, including actual source code to work with; and the mathematical foundations needed to be an expert in this fieldMoreover, you will read about state-of-the-art topics such as geometry clipmapping and other level-of-detail algorithms that deal efficiently with massive terrain datasets.Rendering Challenges in Virtual Globes
Contents Overview
OpenGlobe Architecture
Conventions
I Fundamentals
Math Foundations
Virtual Globe Coordinate Systems
Ellipsoid Basics
Coordinate Transformations
Curves on an Ellipsoid
Resources
Renderer Design
The Need for a Renderer
Bird’s-Eye View
State Management
Shaders
Vertex Data
Textures
Framebuffers
Putting It All Together: Rendering a Triangle
Resources
Globe Rendering
Tessellation
Shading
GPU Ray Casting
Resources
II Precision
Vertex Transform Precision
Jittering Explained
Rendering Relative to Center
Rendering Relative to Eye Using the CPU
Rendering Relative to Eye Using the GPU
Recommendations
Resources
Depth Buffer Precision
Causes of Depth Buffer Errors
Basic Solutions
Complementary Depth Buffering
Logarithmic Depth Buffer
Rendering with Multiple Frustums
W-Buffer
Algorithms Summary
Resources
III Vector Data
Vector Data and Polylines
Sources of Vector Data
Combating Z-Fighting
Polylines
Resources
Polygons
Render to Texture
Tessellating Polygons
Polygons on Terrain
Resources
Billboards
Basic Rendering
Minimizing Texture Switches
Origins and Offsets
Rendering Text
Resources
Exploiting Parallelism in Resource Preparation
Parallelism Everywhere
Task-Level Parallelism in Virtual Globes
Architectures for Multithreading
Multithreading with OpenGL
Resources
IV Terrain
Terrain Basics
Terrain Representations
Rendering Height Maps
Computing Normals
Shading
Resources
Massive-Terrain Rendering
Level of Detail
Preprocessing
Out-of-Core Rendering
Culling
Resources
Geometry Clipmapping
The Clipmap Pyramid
Vertex Buffers
Vertex and Fragment Shaders
Blending
Clipmap Update
Shading
Geometry Clipmapping on a Globe
Resources
Chunked LOD
Chunks
Selection
Cracks between Chunks
Switching
Generation
Shading
Out-of-Core Rendering
Chunked LOD on a Globe
Chunked LOD Compared to Geometry Clipmapping
Resources
Implementing a Message Queue