I haven't found any terrain rendering that does caves at all, although there are games that do it. I haven't been able to find any terrain rendering code that handles this, or even attempts to. Simply cutting a hole doesn't work, you need the vertices to line up and the textures to transition from terrain to cave. If you use a seperate mesh for the cave, then there's the problem of having a smooth transition from the heightmapped terrain into the cave mesh. If you do caves as heightmaps, you are still limited to the confines of heightmaps. Both of which are viable solutions, with some limitations. Or the solution to create the cave as a mesh and cut a hole out of the heightmapped terrain and insert the mesh. Programmers will discuss solutions to overhangs and caves, such as using multiple heightmaps, one for the cave floor, one for the ceiling, etc. Heightmaps are good for algorithms, but on steep terrain the polygons stretch and give undesired results, and of course there's the limitation of overhangs and caves. There are few editors out there for terrain, and they are almost all heightmap based. Still, it annoys me that programmers (me included) create solutions that allow us to automatically generate terrain from heightmaps, and automatically texture terrain based on height or slope, and ignore the fact that it always looks generated. I've looked at the various terrain rendering projects for Ogre, and they are all very interesting and produce good looking results - kudos to the developers. The reason I'm considering this is because currently there aren't any tools that give artists the freedom to create terrain as they want it to look, with overhangs, caves and textures in the places they want. Then apply a mesh simplification process over the pieces, but only simplifying the internal vertices within a tile, and not the outer vertices that border the tile. I'm sure I'll get shot down on this one, but I've been thinking about taking a large polygon soup mesh and pre-processing step, break the mesh into tiles.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |