Terrain demo much extended
March 11, 2010Our procedural terrain demo (see kambi_vrml_game_engine/examples/vrml/terrain
in SVN) got a lot of improvements this week:
- Heterogeneous terrain (idea from Ken Musgrave) implemented, this makes more realistic terrain (smooth valleys, noisy mountains).
- Terrain is rendered with nice blended texture layers, normals are calculated for fake lighting, fog may be used, all by simple GLSL shader.
- Simple LOD approach for rendering is used, this is an ultra-dumbed-down version of geometry clipmaps. The way I simplified this is unfortunately painfully visible as LOD "popping" artifacts. But, hey, at least I can view really large terrain.
- You can test various noise interpolation methods, including Catmull-Rom splines.
- 2D noise can be blurred, which (may) improve the terrain look.
- You can switch camera to Walk mode.
- You can add a heighmap from grayscale image to generated terrain.
- Rendering uses VBOs for speed.
Finally, the programmers may be interested in my my notes and links about basic terrain generation methods.