TURKEY Visualization of large geometric environments has always been an exciting project for computer graphics practitioners. Modern graphics workstations allow rendering of millions of polygons per second. Although these systems are impressive, they cannot catch up with the quality demanded by graphics systems used for visualizing complex geometric environments. After all, in such systems the amount of data that need to be processed increases dramatically as well. No matter how much graphics

more »

... rdware evolves, it looks like practitioners are going to crave for what is impracticable for such hardware to render at interactive frame rates. In this chapter, we present some modeling techniques to overcome the problem of graphics hardware bottleneck in a particular context, viz. visualization of terrains and urban environments.