A Raster-based Approach for Waterbodies Mesh Generation

Roberto Nisxota Menegais, Flavio Paulus Franzin, Lorenzo Schwertner Kaufmann, Cesar Tadeu Pozzer

2021

Abstract

Meshes representing the water plane for rivers and lakes are used in a broad range of graphics applications (e.g., games and simulations) to enhance the visual appeal of 3D virtual scenarios. These meshes can be generated manually by an artist or automatically from supplied vector data (e.g. GIS data - Geographic Information System), where rivers and lakes are represented by polylines and polygons, respectively. In automated solutions, the polylines and polygons are extruded and then merged, commonly using geometric approaches, to compose a single polygonal mesh, which is used to apply the water shaders during the rendering process. The geometric approaches usually fail to present scalability for large datasets with a high vertex and feature count. Also, these approaches require specific algorithms for dealing with river-river and river-lake junctions between the entities. In opposition to geometric approaches, in this paper, we propose a raster-based solution for efficient offline mesh generation for lakes and rivers, represented as polygons and polylines, respectively. The solution uses a novel buffering algorithm for generating merged waterbodies from the vector data. A modification of the Douglas-Peucker simplification algorithm is applied for reducing the vertex count and a constrained Delaunay triangulation for obtaining the triangulated mesh. The algorithm is designed with a high level of parallelism, which can be exploited to speed up the generation time with a multi-thread processor and GPU computing. The results show that our solution is scalable and efficient, generating seamless polygonal meshes for lakes and rivers in arbitrary large scenarios.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Menegais R., Franzin F., Kaufmann L. and Pozzer C. (2021). A Raster-based Approach for Waterbodies Mesh Generation. In Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2021) - Volume 1: GRAPP; ISBN 978-989-758-488-6, SciTePress, pages 143-152. DOI: 10.5220/0010195501430152

in Bibtex Style

@conference{grapp21,
author={Roberto Nisxota Menegais and Flavio Paulus Franzin and Lorenzo Schwertner Kaufmann and Cesar Tadeu Pozzer},
title={A Raster-based Approach for Waterbodies Mesh Generation},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2021) - Volume 1: GRAPP},
year={2021},
pages={143-152},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010195501430152},
isbn={978-989-758-488-6},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2021) - Volume 1: GRAPP
TI - A Raster-based Approach for Waterbodies Mesh Generation
SN - 978-989-758-488-6
AU - Menegais R.
AU - Franzin F.
AU - Kaufmann L.
AU - Pozzer C.
PY - 2021
SP - 143
EP - 152
DO - 10.5220/0010195501430152
PB - SciTePress