A Heightfield on an Isometric Grid

Morgan McGuire and Peter Sibley

Brown University

The Isometric Heightfield

10% more accurate, subjectively smoother

Practical for real applications
GPU accelerated
Drawback: requires resampling

Motivation

Traditional Ortho-Heightfield
Grid

3D View
y-displacement

Heightfield Benefits

Represent scientific data at highest fidelity

Practical
Great for dynamic data
Storage efficient for high-frequency data
Simple!

Worst Case Ortho Fit

vs. Best

Musgraves Heightfield
Shear axes to produce a parallelogram
Equilateral tessellation
GridSpace

WorldSpace
c

c, r S c r , r

New Isometric Heightfield

New Mapping
Shift odd rows edge length
Slide end vertices to make square tiles
Border padding for computing vertex normals

Drop-in replacement for ortho-heightfield

GridSpace

WorldSpace
x

c, r S 2c r & 1, r 1

Related Work
Musgrave 88
Grid Tracing: Fast Ray Tracing for Height Fields

Duchaineau et al 97
ROAMing terrain: real-time optimally adapting meshes

de Boer 00
Fast Terrain Rendering Using Geometrical MipMapping

Shankel 02
Fast Heightfield Normal Calculation

Middleton 01, 02
Edge Detection in a Hexagonal-image Processing Framework
Markov Random Fields for Square Hexagonal Textures

Analysis

Signal Processing Analysis

Underlying true function h(x, z)

Heightfield approximation:
Low-pass filter and sample
y(x, z) at integer x, z
Barycentric interpolation for non-integer x, z

Reasons for poor fit:

Aliasing from inadequate sampling
Inappropriate reconstruction filter (i.e. triangles)

Experiment
Approximate a 2D Sinusoid
h(x, z) = sin(f[x cos + z sin ] +)
Vary phase, angle, and frequency
Error Metrics

Elevation
Shading
Normal deflection
Curvature

Any function is a weighted sum of sinusoids

Draw generalizations about arbitrary functions

Cleaner High Freq.

Ortho

Iso

Smoother Low Freq.

Ortho

Shaded

Iso

Smoother Low Freq.

Ortho

Shaded

Curvature

Iso

Shading Error

(lower is better)

Isometric:25%more
accurateshading.

Algorithms

Resampling
Existing ortho-grid sampled data
Reconstruct true continuous surface
Filter and downsample on hex pattern
Lossless if original was correctly sampled

Artist created data

Iso-heightfield as modeling primitive

Moving on the Surface

We know elevation at vertices
We need elevation between vertices
Must exactly match rendered elevation!

4 cases, easily derived from Barycentric

interpolation
H

J=(1-)H + G

L=(1-)H+I
P=(1-)J+L

Fast Vertex Normals

Indices of neighbors:

d p C 1 s e p C s
g pC s
s

p
C

f p 1

h p C 1 s i p 1

I
H

Grid space edge vectors:

PD 12 , Dy Py, sin 3
PF 1, Fy Py,0
PH 12 , Hy Py, sin 3

PE 12 , Ey Py, sin 3
PG 12 , Gy Py, sin 3
PI 1, Iy Py,0

Vertex normal contains 6 cross-products:

N PE PD PF PE PG PF
PH PG PI PH PD PI

F
G

Fast Vertex Normals

Algebra dramatically simplifies:

D
P

I
H

E
F
G

N 64 sin 3 GD y EH y 2 FI y ,4, GD y EH y

Operation count: 6 add, 1 mul

Cheaper than 1 cross-product!

Normals in Vertex Shader

6 texture lookups (NV50?)
Neighbor indices are the same for each tile
Precompute and store in tex coord stream

Precomputed
outsidevertex
shader

const uniform mat4 K =

Actualper
vertexwork

vec3
vec3
vec4
vec4

MV

1T

1
3

1
3

2
3

0
1
0

0
0
0

A(tex2D(d), tex2D(h), tex2D(i));

B(tex2D(g), tex2D(e), tex2D(f));
C(A B, 1);
N = mul(K, C);

0
4
0

Fast Shadow Volumes

Heightfield Tiles

Page from disk

Unit of LOD, texturing

Wake Island from Battlefield 1942 courtesy of Digital

Illusions CE

Triangle Strips

Start

End

Sub-sampled LOD
Geo-mipmapping would be ideal
Cannot afford to touch vertices on CPU

Use subsampling
Keep edges at maximum resolution
Carefully alpha-blend transitions

LOD Movie

Efficient Storage (NV20+)

Pack x, z in int16 vertex stream
Same for every tile

Pack y in int16 texture coordinate stream

Combine streams in vertex shader
Modify y on CPU, upload a relatively small
vertex array
2 bytes/vertex vs. 12 bytes/vertex

Efficient Storage (NV40)

Put y in a texture
SM 3 allows texture lookup in vertex shader!

Modify y using render-to-texture

Navier-Stokes
Render deformations
Tire tracks & footprints
[insert your favorite GPU hack here]

Applications

Visualization

Games

Acknowledgements
Advisor John F. Hughes
Battlefield 1942 data courtesy of Digital Illusions CE
Mars data from Dr. James Head III, Brown University
Additional coding:
Hari Khalsa
Nick Musurca

Hardware and data made available by:

Elevation Error

(lower is better)

Isometric:Same
qualitywith10%
fewerpolygons.

What about ROAM?

Irregular tessellation:
y(x, z) for a data-dependent set of samples
Barycentric interpolation between samples
Can produce a better fit

Less aliasing: put samples where needed

e.g. ROAM, Triangulated Irregular Networks

Heightfields are still preferred for many applications

Our Mapping (2)

Grid to world space:

c, r S 2c r & 1, r 1
Grid space to memory:

c, r c rC
Row and column sizes:

R, C ; C 3 1; R 2 sin C 3, R odd
3

Also tweak end-vertices on even rows

Drop-in replacement for orthogonal heightfield
Square tiles
Convenient texture & normal mapping

Need Indices and Weights

H

P
G

Indices:g=?,h=?,i=?
Weights:wG=,wH=?,wI=

Barycentric Interpolation
H
J=(1-)H + G

L=(1-)H+I

P=(1-)J+L
I
G
wG=1,wH=1,wI=

Simple equations exist for g, h, i, ,

4 triangle orientations: {even row, odd row} x {up, down}

Example
Given P = (c, r)
Let u c c , v r r , p c r C
Example: odd row, up triangle
( r mod 2 1) and (u v)
g=p+C,h=p,i=g+1

=v, =u
3 other cases

Self-Shadowing is Hard
Problems:
Shadow maps are expensive for terrain
High fill rate

Shadow volumes expensive for terrain

High fill and vertex rate

Pre-computation, horizon map no good for

dynamic data

A Trick for Shadowing

Constrain the sun orbit the z-axis
i.e. moves strictly East-West

(x0, z0) only be shadowed by (x0 k, z0)

Start at the sun end of the x-axis, iterate over
vertices
Incrementally compute the max shadowed
elevation
Works on ortho-heightfield too

Fast Shadow Volumes

Terrain shadows other objects
Other objects do not shadow terrain (use projective
shadows, shadow maps, volumes, etc. for that)
Iterates along rows, which are memory-aligned
Almost free
Compute shadowing inside the loop that uploads elevation to
the graphics card

Future Work
Compute true Geo-mipmapped LOD in
hardware?
LOD w/ normal maps
Update shadow elevation in hardware?
Experiments with deformation and
destruction

Irregular Sampling

Regular
Irregular spacing
captures shape better:

Irregular

General Ortho Problem