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This is quite old but still vaguely impressive to see the visual results - however there is one fatal flaw, every newbie gamedev churns out a terrain engine bec

by jheriko 15y ago

This is quite old but still vaguely impressive to see the visual results - however there is one fatal flaw, every newbie gamedev churns out a terrain engine because they look very good with little technical investment and are easy to implement in any tutorial copied rendering framework... in essence its teaching newbies how to do newbie stuff. I'm fairly convinced that distance field raytracing is the way to go for terrain rendering - one poly and some extra overhead in the fragment shader (which is not trivial I'll admit) vs. thousands/millions of polys and the same fragment shading pass you use for everything else...

jheriko 15y ago
(trying to undo the snobbery a little - I made a demo of something like this some 5 years ago and it actually helped land me a job)
felipemnoa 15y ago
>>I'm fairly convinced that distance field raytracing is the way to go for terrain rendering - one poly and some extra overhead in the fragment shader Could you elaborate a bit more on this technique. Can you use this technique in 3D games when playing real time? I had the impression that all 3D games used meshes for the terrain, do you know of a popular 3D game that uses this technique you mentioned? Finally, do you happen to know a link to a good introduction/tutorial? Thanks!
- corysama 15y ago
  http://wwwcg.in.tum.de/Research/Publications/TerrainRayCasting http://wwwcg.in.tum.de/Research/Publications/TerrainRayCasti... Claims ~30fps @1080p on an Nvida 260GT (that's a reasonable gamer card today) Seems like a more formal reinvention of this guy's "Quadtree Displacement Mapping" http://www.drobot.org/ http://www.drobot.org/ You would be better to check out drobot's slides first. More descriptive, less formal.
  - felipemnoa 15y ago
    Thanks!