Monday, June 16, 2008

Procedural Planet - Texture Generation

Texture Generation for procedural planet was a simple step up from generating height based texture for a flat terrain. Because the underlying structure of each planet is a cube, 6 textures are required for each planet. The height is calculated from the distance of the vertex to the centre of the planet, minus the base radius of the planet. This method allows 100% re usage of the normal terrain height map and texture generation functionality.





In the above video the planet is made up of 125x125x6 vertices's and the moon from 65x65x6 faces. There is currently no complete LOD functionality. When fully implemented each face recursively subdivides into 4 faces of equal area, resulting in the level of detail of each face increasing by a level of 4 with each divide.

With some clean programming, a vertex should never have to be calculated more than once (unless the player moves a distance away and the section is deleted from memory). The parent will populate each of its children with the relevant subset of its data, and only the unknown sections calculated, resulting in lower memory usage as well as faster run time higher LOD generation.

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