Book Review: Focus on 3D Terrain Programming

Short and to the point, Focus on 3D Terrain Programming by Trent Polack is a good introduction to some of the algorithms used for 3D terrains. The book works well in introducing the simplest forms and growing more and more complex. Starting with a simple brute force algorithm, it covers terrain generation of fractal terrain, geo-mipmapping and culling, creating a quadtree terrain engine, ROAM (Realtime Optimally Adapting Meshes) with some optimizations as well.

Along with the terrain it also covers loading and creating texture files associated with terrain including texture map generation, using detail maps, and light maps.

There are also a few lighting techniques: height based lighting, slope lighting and some simple graphics fx for water, skyboxes and skydomes, particles etc.

This is more of a focused primer, but really the source code is what makes this book really standout. The code is very well commented, and easy to understand, which works handily with the descriptions in the book.

All in all, if you haven't worked with terrains before this is a good starting point, with lots of C++ examples to learn from.

Best of luck building,
Michael Hubbard
http://michaelhubbard.ca

Terragen 2 (free version) Test

Finally got a chance to post some of the Terragen 2 tests I was looking into. I was very impressed with some of the quality that could be achieved with this program with minimal effort and intuitive interface. The image is from following the "First Scene" example in the Online Documentation. I thought the galleries were indeed better then my final result, but for only reading a few of the values and playing around a bit with the settings, I felt that the process was of a good quality and could likely be improved with practice.

Setting up the scene (following along the documentation) could likely be setup in only a couple of minutes, if I was to do the scene again I would estimate around five minutes of initial setup for getting the scene and then however long you needed to tweak values and colors.

It is not all silver lining unfortunately, I feel like the close up "grass" (just a green color) and some of the water would likely have to be touched up in photoshop as well as maybe adjusting some of the contrast and color. I think with some additional practice this could be improved in terragen, but I would need to do some trial and error to set appropriate color values for different lighting and atmosphere conditions.

On a whole, I think the result is very strong, the rendering time was a bit long (I had a number of other processes going simultaneously) but the total time for the 800x600 image was 1:16:34s with 2363295 micro-triangles. I am sure with a faster machine this would be greatly improved, although terragen documentation still suggests the rendering time could take 30+ minutes on even newer machines.

I will definitely be playing more with this tool in the future and will see what kind of results are generated from the mesh data that is exported into other 3d renderers.

Definitely worth a try if you enjoy terrains, and it is free for non-commercial use.

Until then, I remain.
Michael Hubbard
http://michaelhubbard.ca