A method of rendering a terrestrial body to be traversed by a mobile platform, characterised by comprising: loading digital terrain elevation data tiles into an external removable mass data storage device that is connected to an onboard computer system; a real-time rendering assist application determining the location and size of a terrestrial body to be traversed by the mobile platform; the real-time rendering assist application calling a base mesh subroutine to load the data representative of the terrestrial body to be traversed into a processing card electronic storage device; the base mesh subroutine calling a chunk subroutine to request the required digital terrain elevation data tiles from the external removable mass data storage device; the chunk subroutine computing a geocentric coordinate vertex relative to the southwest corner of each data point of the digital terrain elevation data chunk and loading pointers to the coordinates in the processing card electronic storage device; the base mesh subroutine overlaying each chunk of digital terrain elevation data with a corresponding root diamond; the base mesh subroutine creating a base mesh that ties root diamonds to their underlying data; the base mesh subroutine computing the root diamond's bounding sphere and error value and places the diamond on a split queue or a merge queue; the base mesh subroutine tessellating the root diamond's stored in the split and merge queues to generate leaf diamonds; the base mesh subroutine computing the vertices of each leaf diamond and storing the vertices in a vertex array; and a graphic card utilizing the vertices of the leaf diamonds to render the terrestrial body to be traversed. loading digital terrain elevation data tiles into an external removable mass data storage device that is connected to an onboard computer system; a real-time rendering assist application determining the location and size of a terrestrial body to be traversed by the mobile platform; the real-time rendering assist application calling a base mesh subroutine to load the data representative of the terrestrial body to be traversed into a processing card electronic storage device; the base mesh subroutine calling a chunk subroutine to request the required digital terrain elevation data tiles from the external removable mass data storage device; the chunk subroutine computing a geocentric coordinate vertex relative to the southwest corner of each data point of the digital terrain elevation data chunk and loading pointers to the coordinates in the processing card electronic storage device; the base mesh subroutine overlaying each chunk of digital terrain elevation data with a corresponding root diamond; the base mesh subroutine creating a base mesh that ties root diamonds to their underlying data; the base mesh subroutine computing the root diamond's bounding sphere and error value and places the diamond on a split queue or a merge queue; the base mesh subroutine tessellating the root diamond's stored in the split and merge queues to generate leaf diamonds; the base mesh subroutine computing the vertices of each leaf diamond and storing the vertices in a vertex array; and a graphic card utilizing the vertices of the leaf diamonds to render the terrestrial body to be traversed.