>From what Dave Yazel has said he's made excellent progress with his
system to generate terrain. For Pernica we abandonned this technique in
favor of hand modeling all of our terrain. We feel the savings we gain
in using fewer vertices to create large amounts of terrain is well worth
it. Plus custom modeled terrain gets the attention to detail of the
artist to make it look good.
- John Wright
Starfire Research
Corysia Taware wrote:
>
> I'm also learning how to do this. Of all the different ways of generating
> terrain, the heightmap seems to be the easiest.
>
> David Yazel had some interesting posts on this subject about 6 months ago.
> If you check the archives, you can read about some of his findings. Perhaps
> we could encourage him to write a tutorial in his non-existant spare time.
> *grin*
>
> Drawing a heightmap with a few TriangleStripArray objects seems to be pretty
> straightforward. And yes, I do think you need to do one strip per row. I
> saw an interesting article on how to do this with only one triangle strip at
> http://www.psky.com/prog/mesh_1.htm but I don't trust it. It seems to me
> you'd get some very undesirable effects on your boundaries. And given that
> you still have to go back down the row, I don't see a substantial vertex
> savings. And drawing a texture to go over that kind of terrain would be
> difficult.
>
> Drawing a 256x256 heightmap generates an unmanageable amount of triangles
> (something near 65,000). So I want to do some sort of LOD management. I'm
> currently experimenting with breaking the heighmap up into square cells.
> Each cell would have a LOD. For example, a 9x9 grid of cells, with the
> camera in the center, may look like this:
>
> 111111111
> 111111111
> 112222211
> 112333211
> 112343211
> 112333211
> 112222211
> 111111111
> 111111111
>
> Each number represents a polygon count for that cell. 1 might represent 2
> triangles, 4 might hold 64 triangles. As the camera moves from one cell to
> another, the LOD changes for all the cells surrounding the camera. The
> biggest problem I see is stitching the cells together.
>
> I'm not sure whether it would be better to generate the LOD values from the
> 256x256 heightmap, or store each cell's LOD on disk. Generating seems
> easiest, but more prone to error. Storing each cell would allow me to tweak
> any values by hand, but seems like it could quicky become a nightmare to
> maintain.
>
> I'd really like to hear how others have done this. I'm not sure I'm on the
> right track.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Quoc Huynh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Friday, June 01, 2001 1:49 AM
> Subject: [JAVA3D] Elevation Grid
>
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I just wanted to know what is the best approach at drawing an
> elevation grid?
> >
> > I have a 250x213 matrix contain heights... an (x,y) matrix. with
> the
> > height as the z component. I have no further information.
> >
> > I'm looking at using the trianglestrip geometry array, however,
> does this
> > mean i need to create a trianglestrip array for each row of my grid??...
> > this would also mean i will be reproducing some shared points between
> > triangle strips???
> >
> > does anyone know a better approach to this?????
> >
> >
> >
> > cheers,
> >
> >
> > Quoc.
> >
> >
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