Originally I was computing the height of terrain per frame which was pretty wasteful since if I wanted more complex noise functions I would not be able to maintain a runnable frame rate. I moved the computation of terrain height to a compute shader which stores the height in a texture. I was also able to compute and store normals in …
In the week following my procedural terrain I added a dynamic quadtree-based LOD system in order to be capable of rendering large scale terrain at distances ranging from several kilometers to a few meters. At this point I ran into the issue that floating point is not accurate enough to accomplish centimeter precision at distances of several hundred thousand meters …
After doing atmospheric scattering I though that it would be an interesting challenge to make a full scale planet renderer. This is what I started with when looking to generate the terrain. The terrain height and color is determined through a height map that I generate in the vertex and fragment shaders. I generated the height map using the 2D …
A few months ago I decided to implement atmospheric scattering in my OpenGL renderer in order to create a day/night cycle. This turns out to be a fairly cheap effect to calculate if you do not need it to be completely accurate of implement multiscattering. One of the early GPU gems books had an implementation of atmospheric scattering that creates …
