I thought people might like to see my first attempt at a terrain flyby
animation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ7wfSX_I5k

This is a little unusual as it's running a full planet model; see
http://code.google.com/p/flooded-moon for more pictures. The landscape
is an isosurface based on Kaguya topographic data and everything's done
to scale.

As you can see, the terrain textures are pretty poor (and there's a few
bugs), and I'm having rather a lot of trouble moving the camera
smoothly; this is with Spline_Trans(). Any advice? I should add that
yes, I am aware that I need to add code to ensure the camera remains
above the terrain, but I already had to abandon the first 11 hour render
run after cocking it up and couldn't face running it a third time.

Next stage is to try and add some fake texture to the terrain model to
make it more interesting. This is going to require rendering a slopemap
and using the technique demonstrated here:

http://www.ignorancia.org/en/index.php?page=Heightfield_based_Isosurfaces

A more challenging task is to populate the surface with objects; a whole
planet, even a small one like Luna, is far too big to populate with
geometry, so I'm going to have to do it procedurally with isosurfaces.
I'm particularly interested in techniques like this:

http://evilsuperbrain.com/gallery/misc/index.php?image=cracklecity-up

I do want some cities, although I'd really like trees. That's a simple
matter of creating a single isosurface that renders all trees, all over
the planet, correctly distributed and placed at the right altitude to
render on the terrain. Easy, really...

-- 
┌─── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ─────
http://www.cowlark.com ─────
│
│ "I have a mind like a steel trap. It's rusty and full of dead mice."
│ --- Anonymous, on rasfc

Post a reply to this message