Game Engine Support for Terrain Rendering in Architectural Design

Game engines are relatively low-cost but powerful systems for creating and exploring virtual environments, and are increasingly used in the fields of architecture and urban planning. Traditionally urban planners and landscape architects used small-scale hand-modelled terrains. However, in order to increase both realism and modelling efficiency it is preferable to use computer generated terrains obtained from remote sensing data. Unfortunately many game engines are designed to use relatively small infinitely repeating terrain blocks. In this paper we analyse how the popular Torque terrain engine, which is used by the Department of Architecture of the University of Auckland, can be modified and extended for architectural purposes. The ultimate limitations of the terrain engine are identified and the terrain engine is evaluated on its suitability for architectural design. We explain how large scale terrains can be incorporated into the engine design and we propose a way to integrate the hardware-friendly chunked level-of-detail terrain rendering algorithm into the terrain engine. Our results show that the proposed implementation makes better use of the GPU of modern graphics cards and it frees CPU load for use by other modules of an architectural design tool.