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Generating Complex Procedural Terrains Using the GPU (2008)

by younata on 12/8/13, 8:11 PM with 15 comments

• by voltagex_ on 12/9/13, 2:27 AM

  Tangentially related:

  http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/morenoise/morenoise.htm

  http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/fog/fog.htm

  http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/compilingsmall/compilings...

  and the finished product is "Elevated" on http://iquilezles.org/prods/

• by highCs on 12/9/13, 1:06 AM

  This demo drew attention a lot in the game industry. Also, there is no mention to it in the nvidia paper but another noteworthy voxel terrain demo was the cave demo (voxlap engine) from Ken Silverman (3D realms / Duke Nukem 3D 'Build' editor) [1].

  [1] http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap/voxlap03.htm

• by jheriko on 12/9/13, 10:29 AM

  its also possible to achieve similar effects using whittaker iteration as a 'sloppy but fast' alternative to the sphere tracing/distance field approach

  there is not much good reference on it though (which is why i am compelled to self link)

  http://software.intel.com/sites/billboard/article/star-chart... http://jheriko-rtw.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/whittakers-method-...

  its less well known by far... Steven Wittens came across it, and I shamelessly nicked it, back when we were doing AVS presets for Winamp. Speaking of Winamp, back then Geiss (the author of this article) created Monkey - it used D3D and hardware acceleration iirc, but also rendered an isosurface similar to the method described in this article.

  It was an interesting period of actual innovation in those days...

• by femto on 12/9/13, 3:51 AM

  Another take on the marching cubes algorithm is here:

  http://www.cs.unc.edu/~marc/tutorial/node130.html

  It more clearly states that marching cubes is a method of converting volumetric data into a bounding surface.

• by mef51 on 12/8/13, 11:38 PM

  This looks super interesting. Does anyone know any other good resources for graphics programming?

• by binarycrusader on 12/9/13, 5:08 AM

  See also Eric Lengyel's take on this which he calls the Transvoxel Algorithm:

  http://www.terathon.com/voxels/

• by svantana on 12/9/13, 10:39 AM

  Very nice, but is this practical for games? What about collision detection, AI players etc? Or would you use it mainly for backgrounds, skies and such?

• by leokun on 12/9/13, 3:04 AM

  I wonder if this is now No Man's Sky works.