Team 2. Boeing

St. Louis, Missouri

Sparse Virtual Texturing

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With drastic advances in visual technology, there has been an increasing demand for high definition imagery in games and simulation software. This is a problem, as high definition images can require larger amounts of memory than are available. The Sparse Virtual Texturing project is a tool that allows for the use of such images in real-time.

Current techniques for displaying textures (2D images placed upon 3D models) store the entire texture when only a small fraction of it may be visible on the screen. For example, when viewing the Western Hemisphere on a model of Earth, even though the Eastern Hemisphere cannot be seen it is still being loaded into memory.

The Sparse Virtual Texturing project only loads the parts of the texture that are actually being viewed. So when viewing the Western Hemisphere on a model of the Earth, this project does not store the portion of the texture containing the Eastern Hemisphere.

The extra memory that this technique frees up allows the use of higher definition textures than would normally be possible. The end result is higher quality visuals and more realistic simulation and game scenery, or the same quality visuals with better performance.

The Sparse Virtual Texturing project is implemented as an extension for OpenSceneGraph, and will be integrated into Boeing Modeling & Simulation Visual applications.

Adam Starks, Patrick Ohren, James Drallos, Alexander Kobylarek

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