Virtual Texturing

poster

Thesis

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• Abstract
  
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• BibTeX
  

• Publication Type: Master Thesis
• Month: October
• First Supervisor: Michael Wimmer

@mastersthesis\{Mayer-2010-VT,
  title =      "Virtual Texturing",
  author =     "Albert Julian Mayer",
  year =       "2010",
  abstract =   "Virtual texturing (as presented by Mittring in ’Advanced
               Virtual Texture Topics’ and in distinction to
               clipmap-style systems, to which this term is also applied)
               is a solution to the problem of real-time rendering of
               scenes with vast amounts of texture data which does not fit
               into graphics or main memory. Virtual texturing works by
               preprocessing the aggregate texture data into equally-sized
               tiles and determining the necessary tiles for rendering
               before each frame. These tiles are then streamed to the
               graphics card and rendering is performed with a special
               virtual texturing fragment shader that does texture
               coordinate adjustments to sample from the tile storage
               texture. A thorough description of virtual texturing and
               related topics is given, along with an examination of
               specific challenges including preprocessing, visible tile
               determination, texture filtering, tile importance metrics
               and many more. Tile determination in view space is examined
               in detail and an implementation for compressing the
               resulting buffer in OpenCL is presented. Rendering with
               correct texture filtering from a texture which contains
               de-correlated texture tiles is attained by using tile
               borders with specific coordinate adjustment and gradient
               correction in the fragment shader. A sample implementation
               is described and serves to provide results concerning
               performance and correctness with different settings and
               architecture choices. Integration into Open Scene Graph for
               usage within a hybrid point-cloud / polygonal renderer
               enables rendering of high resolution paintings within
               catacombs modeled with point clouds. Another application is
               presented, the real-time display of a highly detailed model
               of New York with more than 60 GB textures. Quantitative
               analysis reveals that frame-rates above 200 FPS are
               attainable on complex scenes with multi-million polygons
               even with outdated hardware. At the same time quality
               remains high, results indicate that ”fallbacks”, that
               occur when a needed texture tile is not ready in time, occur
               only for 0.01% of the pixels on average. These results show
               that virtual texturing can be a competitive solution for
               games, scientific and industrial applications, allowing for
               real-time rendering of scenes that could not be displayed
               previously, while maintaining acceptable visual quality.",
  address =    "Favoritenstrasse 9-11/186, A-1040 Vienna, Austria",
  school =     "Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms, Vienna
               University of Technology",
  month =      oct,
  URL =        "http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2010/Mayer-2010-VT/",
}