Rendering Massive Virtual Worlds

This course is presented in four sections. The first two presentations show how huge data sets can be streamed and displayed in real time for virtual-globe rendering inside a web browser. Topics include pre-processing, storage, and transmission of real-world data, plus cache hierarchies and efficient culling algorithms.

The third section reviews content generation using a combination of procedural and artist-driven techniques. It explores integration of content-generation applications into production tool chains and their use in creation of real-world video games. Topics include productivity, data dependencies, and the trade-offs of putting massive procedural content generation into production.

The fourth section covers recent advances in graphics hardware architecture that allow GPUs to virtualize graphics resources (specifically, textures) by leveraging virtual memory. It discusses augmentation of traditional graphics APIs and presents several use cases and examples.

The final presentation shows how support for hardware-assisted virtual texturing was integrated into a game engine. It reviews the challenges associated with ensuring that the engine continued to operate efficiently on hardware that does not support virtual texturing. It also illustrates the concessions made in the engine for limitations of existing hardware and proposes some future enhancements that would improve the usability of the solution.

COURSE SCHEDULE

2 pm
Introduction
Sellers

2:10 pm
Handling Planetary Scale Datasets
Cozzi

2:40 pm
World-Scale Terrain Rendering
Ring

3:10 pm
Populating a Massive Game World
Persson

3:30 pm
Break

3:45 pm
Hardware Virtual Texturing and Demo
Sellers

4:15 pm
High Quality Software and Hardware Virtual Textures
van Waveren

5 pm
Conclusion and Discussion
All