title: Compressed facade displacement maps.
abstract: We describe an approach to render massive urban models. To prevent a memory transfer bottleneck we propose to render the models from a compressed representation directly. Our solution is based on rendering crude building outlines as polygons and generating details by ray-tracing displacement maps in the fragment shader. We demonstrate how to compress a displacement map so that a decompression algorithm can selectively and quickly access individual entries in a fragment shader. Our prototype implementation shows how a massive urban model can be compressed by a factor of 85 and outperform a basic geometry-based renderer by a factor of 40 to 80 in rendering speed.
authors.affiliation: AMD, Santa Clara, CA 95054, USA. mail.saifali@gmail.com
authors.forename: Saif
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ali
authors.forename: Jieping
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ye
authors.forename: Anshuman
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Razdan
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Wonka