Interactive Terrain Rendering on Parallel Machines
by Patrick Angeles
Advisor: Paul Coddington
Rendering Terrain
By convention, terrain data comes in the format of a 2.5-dimensional
mesh. The terrain is made up of a flat two dimensional grid on
the x and y axes, each vertex (x,y) having
an elevation component corresponding to z. To render terrain
data, triangles are constructed out of the vertices such that for
every four vertices a, b, c and d that form a square,
two triangles are constructed, namely abc and adc.
The following figure, taken from the application, shows terrain
data in triangle format.
Implementation
At the time of writing, we have successfully implemented a basic
terrain renderer capable of displaying either wire-frame or Gouraud
shaded polygons. The application is written in C language using
the X11 library. How were the results? . . .
See for yourself!
Patrick J. Angeles
Computer Science Department,
Oberlin College, Ohio.
e-mail: pangeles@cs.oberlin.edu