Horde3D

Click for orbital view
Click for ground view

Here are a couple of shots from the early stages of my planet plugin. First shot is from about 5,000 km altitude, and the second from less than 100 m. Frame rates are not ideal close to the ground, as I have not integrated any culling yet. Equally I am only using altitude shading on the terrain, using a low-resolution height map of the earth (polar->cubic projection of 2D height map), which only provides 80-metre height resolution.

The next few features planned are procedural detail, slope/altitude dependent texture splatting, and atmosphere shaders. Further refinements will hopefully add vegetation and trees.

_________________
Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

Hey, that sounds really interesting! Keep up the good work!

drooling... you have to post a vid or demo. Very nice!

Are you aiming for something along the lines of Qube ( http://www.qubesoft.com/index.php?main= ... -preview-2 )

Quite a ways from a demo, but a video will be forthcoming once I reach my next milestone: procedural detail (working already, but not pretty yet), texture-splatting and atmosphere.

Nice link, I hadn't seen Qube before. There seems to be an explosion of planet rendering lately, but my current system builds on the techniques of Ysaneya, followed closely by Spore.

If anyone has a burning interest in this topic, I also have a small library worth of links to articles and techniques squirrelled away

_________________
Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

That's really sweet!

Sure. I am always interested in learning new techniques. I wish i had the time to help you out this is a very cool project.

I don't want to turn this into a support thread, but if anyone cares to take a look/make suggestions, I am having a lot of trouble with my tangent basis: support thread on gamedev.net

_________________
Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

is this normal map for a plane or a sphere. it is weird for a normal map for a sphere. definitely it is created from a sphere but if you use the normal map on a sphere it may look weird

it is technically the normal map of a cube - unfortunately it doesn't work on a cube either

The 4 sides map correctly, as they are intended to, but the top and bottom have somehow reversed tangent space (not normals, the normal map and normals are fine).

_________________
Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

One of the joys of living in the Caribbean - the phones and internet have been out for 3 days. I did however solve my normal-mapping problem in the interim, by switching to world-space normal maps.

I also separated out the ground into a land layer and a water layer, and added an atmosphere layer to try out integrating Sean O'Neil's atmospheric-scattering shaders - his shader's look pretty good right out of the box, but they push my card to its knees - in fact, I have gone from pixel bound to vertex bound as a result!


Click for larger normal-map view


Click for larger atmosphere view

_________________
Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

The atmosphere looks good. It's a cool project, I'm really curious to follow your progress!

Very nice!

I skimmed a paper yesterday that pre-computes a giant lookup-table for all the scattering data, trading off video memory for a lot less processing. I'll try and find the link...
[edit] http://www-ljk.imag.fr/Publications/Basilic/com.lmc.publi.PUBLI_Conference@119f111f339_18c3679/index.html

BTW, this site is great for looking up new graphics research:
http://kesen.huang.googlepages.com/

Nice link there! I am going to give that a shot in the next few days.

_________________
Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

That was fairly trivial to implement, seeing as I had the full source code before me, but the result didn't perform as well as I had hoped. My intention is to have the system viewable (though not necessarily very pretty) on SM2.0 cards, though that may not turn out possible.

So on that note, I am starting out to develop a new technique to 'fake' the atmosphere using only the depth buffer and a fullscreen quad. Results so far less than satisfactory, but I think I have the basis in place, and a little more work should do the trick:


Click for full size

_________________
Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

Hey Swiftcoder, how is this project coming along? You have to give us a little update

I am keeping an eye on this one, as it is a very interesting project and i love space games.