Dual-space ray casting for height field rendering

ABSTRACT This paper presents a realistic ray casting model on a curved surface. Guided by the model, we derive an analytical solution for spherical surfaces and propose a mathematical model by solving one problem in two spaces. By using the solution, we introduce a novel framework for spherical height field rendering. We have successfully implemented a spherical height field rendering framework on the graphics processing unit and obtained real‐time rendering rates with screen error below 1 pixel. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Scene snapshots: (a) scene rendered using the Google texture dataset and (b) scene rendered using the National Aeronautics and Space Administration dataset with height field enlarged 10 times.