1. A process for prioritized refinement of a tile mesh modeling a surface in a level-of-detail hierarchy, comprising: obtaining a plurality of elevation values for an elevation grid of the surface; downsampling a rasterized elevation grid to a resolution based on a minimum edge size for triangles of the tile mesh, as determined by a level-of-detail (LOD) parameter, balancing object-space and view-space LOD mechanisms; encoding the elevation grid into a linearized quadtree of virtual nodes; iteratively refining the quadtree according to an adaptive sampling pattern based on prioritized split tests using application specific criteria; and converting the optimized linearized quadtree into a tile mesh, wherein a split test forces a limiting degree of prioritized refinement along mesh boundaries in multi-tile databases to avoid introducing inter-tile data dependencies during tile creation and display.