Terrain rendering and collision acceleration

Master-Thesis

The goal of the thesis is to find advanced methods for terrain rendering and collision detection with the physics simulation tool Vortex. Vortex uses heightfields as well as triangle meshes for terrain representations. As first step, level-of-detail and culling methods should be analysed and implemented in Vortex using the possibilities of the interface Open Scene Graph.
The second part of the work concerns the collision detection on terrains consisting of an irregular triangle mesh. Currently, the terrain in Vortex is subdivided in regular cells and an object is tested for collision with all triangles in each cell intersecting the object. The goal is to create an appropriate hierarchical structure for the cells, which will allow to reduce the number of triangles for the collision test and which is easy to update for dynamic scenes. Further points of the collision acceleration will be a generation of an OOBB for the colliding objects as well as smooth terrain and normal interpolation for the collision dynamics.

Advisor(s)