Experimenting with Concurrent Binary Trees for Large Scale Terrain Rendering

In this talk, we share results of our novel technique using concurrent binary trees for large-scale terrain rendering, as well as the results of the deep dive into latest efforts to integrate the original technique into the Unity game engine. Part of the SIGGRAPH 2021 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course (http://advances.realtimerendering.com/). We will review the foundations of concurrent binary trees and provide intuition about their benefits for computing adaptive tessellations for large-scale terrain geometries. The speakers will share further optimizations found over the original implementation and showcase early integration results.

Speaker Bios:
Thomas Deliot is a senior research engineer working at Unity Technologies. His work focuses on computer graphics topics and improving real-time rendering of 3D content, by bringing new papers into rendering engines and bridging the gap from research to production. This includes GPU/parallel programming, post-processing, level-of-detail, materials, lighting and machine learning.

Jonathan Dupuy is a senior research scientist working at Unity Technologies. His research interests are primarily oriented towards high quality real-time rendering. This encompasses a wide range of topics including antialiasing, level-of-detail, analytic models for both materials and lighting, and GPU/parallel programming.

Kees Rijnen is an engineering manager working at Unity Technologies. His work focuses on helping his team research and develop new environment technologies and workflows.

Xiaoling Yao is a senior graphics programmer working at Unity Technologies. His work mainly focuses on improving the terrain system, integrating with new artist workflows and adding graphics features like instancing and virtual texturing.