terrain rendering

Hi Everyone,

I am just playing around with texturing terrains using GLSL. Does anyone know of any good examples on this topic. So far I am using two textures that blend according to the elevation, and I am also trying to apply detail textures. I am passing the dimension of the terrain to the shader, and it turns out that I can actually compute the main texture coordinates in the shader. I cannot see a way of computing the detail texture coords, because I don’t think that I can get information about neighboring vertices.

Basically I want to create a nice terrain with snow on the mountains and grass in the valleys. It seem that this should be computed in the shaders but I am still pondering on how this could be done. There isn’t much discussion about this topic in this blog, or anywhere else I looked. So I figured it might be a good idea to
start a thread …

Also, I have seen how morphing is done in shaders. Has anyone ever tried to make little grass shapes appear on the terrain according to
the distance to the viewer ?

Cheers
Jochen

Originally posted by Jochen:
Also, I have seen how morphing is done in shaders. Has anyone ever tried to make little grass shapes appear on the terrain according to
the distance to the viewer ?

I am trying to do it but up to now, I was quite disappointed by the results.
In the meanwhile, I’ve checked some extra documentation as a starting point:

“Animating Prairies in Real-Time” by Frank Perbet and Marie-Paule Cani proposed a geometry driven approach. Results are rather good looking but they require some CPU work.

There are also other very useful resources but I believe the above is the best of them.

There’s also a little article on this month (or maybe last month) game developer magazine but it didn’t impress me much.

None of them are really focused on shader technology because there’s no need to.

This topic was automatically closed 183 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.