Terrain rendering (history)

Brano Kemen

2001

Fractal terrains with shadows, textures and geometry generated on the fly on CPU. Adaptive triangulation. Baked-in terrain shadows computed along with the terrain data.

2003 - 2004

Larger scale terrains with 100km visibility. Multilevel fractals with changing characteristics dependent on user-specified profile curves. Modification of midpoint subdivision fractal algorithm generating much better terrain slopes. However, the artifacts of midpoint subdivision fractal algorithm are still present.
 

2006

First version using a part of actual Earth elevation data with 1km raster, further refined by existing fractal algorithm. World is not yet mapped to sphere, though.

2007

Planet rendering. Using elevation data with 90m resolution.

2008

Major rewrite.
Working with Laco Hrabcak and Tomas Mihalovic, with Laco working on asynchronous rendering engine and thus freeing me to concentrate more on the terrain rendering itself. Tomas works on tools compiling elevation and other datasets to format suitable for realtime streaming.
Stuff that has been done:

• running under new fully async rendering engine
• elevation data are compressed using wavelet compression that allows very effective extraction of desired level of detail
• fractal algorithm was modified to run entirely on GPU in shaders, allowing also use of bicubic interpolation that has removed any artifacts
• enhanced procedural material generation
• moved almost all algorithms to be asynchronously executed on GPU
• atmosphere rendering (simulated atmospheric scattering)
• vast amounts of trees, placed according to ecotope distribution rules

Working on:

• incorporating climatic model and ground cover and vegetation library
• tree generator
• shadows
• models, scene manager
• physics