Im aware there are TONS of Terrain tutorials out there for OpenGL......but are their any that aren't OpenGL 1.x-2.x? Keep in mind im just a beginner but Terrain Rendering is kind of something I REALLY want to learn about, and most of the tutorials seem....well outdated.

For that matter are their any websites with "updated" tutorials for the newer OpenGL standards (4.0) because im lookin and I can't really find any besides whats on the website.

Thanks!

edit: Also for that matter I have the Superbible 5th edition....but im a bit confused at what the real differences between 3.X and 4.0 are?

thanks

What seems 'out dated' about them?

Many of the advancements in terrain height map rendering have nothing directly to do with the API under them and most break down into one of ;

• generate vertex buffer on CPU and render
• use a static buffers and use vertex textures to displace
• use the new tesselator hardware to generate points in space and displace based on texture
• use a compute shader/OpenCL to generate the vertex buffers

If you see a tutorial which uses glVertex then this could safely be replaced with mapping a vertex buffer and writing directly to it and then rendering the vb.

Oh, and the differences between GL3.x and GL4.x are effectively that GL4.x exposes D3D11 hardware level features as part of the core API, where as GL3.x are DX10.x level features.

Im aware there are TONS of Terrain tutorials out there for OpenGL......but are their any that aren't OpenGL 1.x-2.x? Keep in mind im just a beginner but Terrain Rendering is kind of something I REALLY want to learn about, and most of the tutorials seem....well outdated.

What type of terrain rendering are you interested in? A real terrain, like in GIS applications, or a generic terrain for games?


If you are interested in real terrain rendering engines I have to propose you a book: 3D Engine Design for Virtual Globes, by Patrick Cozzi and Kevin Ring . The book is not yet in the stock, but will be in few days (I hope). I must admit that those guys wrote an excellent book. The book contains tons of tutorials for building virtual globes, tons of (C#) code and an on-line source code (under svn).


And, of course, Virtual Terrain is priceless source of all terrain rendering knowledge.


If you are looking for the latest techniques in terrain rendering, then NVIDIA'a TerrainTessellation tutorial is for you (although I was not very excited when I read it, and the frame-rate on GTX470 is not breathtaking). Be aware that this is a D3D code, but it can be converted to OpenGL. Furthermore, NVIDIA announced that OpenGL version of its SDK will be soon available (that "soon" already lasts for some time... )