REAL-TIME RENDERING OF DEFORMABLE SNOW COVERS
Abstract: Rendering snow environments in real-time requires effective methods for representing the snow and its properties. This thesis explores methods for rendering deformable snow covers, where a dynamic heightfield is used for storing snow heights. Collision detection for cylinder geometries is used to generate tyretracks from wheels. A depth buffer is used to make the snow follow the shap eof the terrain and the midpoint displacement algorithm to initialise values for the snow. Different methods for triangulating the heightfield are considered and the effects of changing the resolution of both the heightfield and the underlying vertex grid are tested. The tests are run in a simulated environment. The results show that heightfields in combination with collision detection for geometric primitives is a promising representation for deformable snow covers, both in regards to visual results and performance. However, some visual artefacts arise because of the heightfield triangulation and representation of vertex normals. Regarding performance, the computational and rendering times seem to increase exponentially with the heightfield resolution. The tests also show that the implementations reach the required frame rates for real-time rendering.
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