george@shumv1.ncsu.edu (George Browning) (03/06/90)
Could anyone recommend some good papers or books discussing the rendering of height fields? A friend of mine is implementing a height field raytracer and any references would be extremely useful. Please reply via email or by posting. Thanks in advance, george _____________________________________________________________________ | George Browning North Carolina State University | | george@shumv1.ncsu.edu Raleigh, NC | |___________________________________________________________________|
markv@gauss.Princeton.EDU (Mark VandeWettering) (03/06/90)
>Could anyone recommend some good papers or books discussing the >rendering of height fields? A friend of mine is implementing a >height field raytracer and any references would be extremely useful. I liked the following paper when I first read it, it proved useful in a couple of ways. %A Sabine Coquillart %A Michael Gangnet %T Shaded Display of Digital Maps %J IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications %P 35-42 %D July, 1984 %K maps, terrain, ray tracing, priority list %X Several methods for displaying height fields are presented. Bilinear interpolation of patches is used to define the surface. Efficient algorithms, and quite elegant. Reminiscent of Kajiya's cut planes for surfaces of revolution. Also, Musgrave had this Yale tech report. I ordered it from Yale Dept of Computer Science, but don't have who to contact over there anymore. Perhaps someone else has the information. Musgrave's approach was basically to make an adaptation of 3DDA uniform subdivision algorithms for height fields. I believe this code is also implemented in Craig Kolb's rayshade program. %A F. Kenton Musgrave %T Grid Tracing: Fast Ray Tracing For Height Fields %J Research Report YALEU/DCS/RR-639 %D July, 1988 Hope this helps. mark