Hi,
What is the best method to create spherical terrain?
Thanks
Best way to create spherical terrain?
What language / engine are you using? You haven't given any info and there aren't any tags on your thread.
I'm doing this for a current project and my approach has been to create my terrain as a cube, then warp that cube into a sphere.
Because a cube is constructed of squares, you can use standard terrain generation and lodding techniques and it's easy to texture.
There is a lot of warping (the grid shape and area is smaller at the corners of the square than at the centres), but that is tolerable for my particular project.
An alternative with less warping is subdivide an icosahedron (will give you triangles), or to truncate a subdivided icosahedron to give you a buckyball (hexagons and some pentagons)
Because a cube is constructed of squares, you can use standard terrain generation and lodding techniques and it's easy to texture.
There is a lot of warping (the grid shape and area is smaller at the corners of the square than at the centres), but that is tolerable for my particular project.
An alternative with less warping is subdivide an icosahedron (will give you triangles), or to truncate a subdivided icosahedron to give you a buckyball (hexagons and some pentagons)
My favorite is a sculpty tool, which every good 3D program has. This makes work fast and accurate with some practice. I have occasionally been forced to use a plane mesh and begin with extrusions - sometimes even having to measure altitudes - and refining that with the sculpty tool. For each terrain element to look completely unique and finish the map in a reasonable time, then a sculpty type of tool is a must, preferably within a terrain editor.
Doing simple work by coding is doable but takes more time initially. Once you get a noise algorithm going, then it can actually be very effective visually, especially if you are skilled in shaders. It can also cover many square miles (or kilometers) in short order. However, highly detailed work is many multiples more time consuming to make terrain, especially if it must be hard edged ( can handle full physics ), by coding instead of using a 3D program such as a terrain editor.
[quote name='C0lumbo' timestamp='1358954593' post='5024738']
There is a lot of warping (the grid shape and area is smaller at the corners of the square than at the centres), but that is tolerable for my particular project.[/quote]
Are you using the improved equation, to minimise warping?
This article from GPU Gems 3 explains how to construct terrain on the GPU (and has a paragraph on spherical planets), but this can also be done offline (it uses basic marching cubes).
There is a lot of warping (the grid shape and area is smaller at the corners of the square than at the centres), but that is tolerable for my particular project.
Are you using the improved equation, to minimise warping?
Nope, I'm just doing the obvious normalise-to-distance.
Will give that a go, thanks!
Have a look at this: http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/models/m_landsp.htm
It describes creating a randomly shaped planet.
It describes creating a randomly shaped planet.
Have a look at this: http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/models/m_landsp.htm
It describes creating a randomly shaped planet.
What a fascinating article, got me very intrigued for a while there, thanks. :)
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