Terrain decimation through Quadtree Morphing

We present a new terrain decimation technique called a Quadtree Morph, or Q-morph. The new approach eliminates the usual popping artifacts associated with polygon reduction, replacing them with less objectionable smooth morphing. We show that Q-morphing is fast enough to create a view-dependent terrain model for each frame in an interactive environment. In contrast to most Geomorph algorithms, Q-morphing does not use a time step to interpolate between geometric configurations. Instead, the geometry motion in a Q-morph is based solely on the position of the viewer.