Don’t ask me how I got the idea but I started experimenting with height maps. It is incredible how much one can do with very little effort.

Heightmap

I riped off a few heightmaps from the internet. Here you can see a mountain range.

The results are quire nice. The only problem comes from the fact that images only have 256 distinct height values. The result can be seen in the valley, the different levels are distinctly visible. But the computation of the lighting is still slightly broken. Either there is a real bug or it is a case of “gourand just won’t cut it”. Grourand shading, the default for openGL, is quite good but in many cases where the geometry is complex the lighting samples are not sufficient.

The shading / lighting problem can be solved in many ways, but on obvious solution is per pixel lighting. The visual artifacts in the plane can be solved with a smoothing filter, but I fear that that will destroy the features in the mountains.

The rendering performance is not great, since a relative trivial implementation was used. I am planing to implement ROAM. Also just reducing the samples in areas with little change can obviously help.

Terrain

Terrain

Terrain