Thursday, November 19, 2009

Higher Detail Heightmap Textures

When originally creating height maps, most of the tutorials store this information in grey-scale, therefore at the time this is what was implemented in decade. Limited to 256 different heights (as only 1 byte is used per value) it may be acceptable for demo's with small terrain patches, but is inadequate for anything larger with a more realistic topography.

To overcome this a terrain file format was created for decade. This allowed the saving of height data to a binary or text file using multiple bytes per value. With the introduction of shaders into Decade terrain engine, this too has become inadequate. I need to send the height information to the shader, along with the source tiles so that the procedural terrain texture can be created. The only feasible way to send this height information to the Graphics Card is in a texture, but the grey-scale implementation did not have high enough detail.

Solution? Combine the texture implementation with the multi-byte file format. To do this I split the floating point height position across the 3 color bytes using some simple bit shifting.

Using 3 bytes it is possible to represent 16777216 unique values (256x256x256). In the following example I want to maintain 3 digits after the decimal separator. This allows me to have terrain heights from 0.000 to 16777.216 which should be suitable for most procedural planets. It is of course possible to make the number of decimal digits configurable.

To convert a floating point height into 3 bytes (used in the texture rgb).

//Get the Height at the current Terrain Position
float l_fHeight = get_HeightAtPoint(l_iXPosition, l_iYPosition);

//Convert to an int. Multiply by 1000 to keep 3 decmial places.
int l_iColor = (int)(l_fHeight * 1000);

//Seperate into 3 Bytes
l_ucRed = ((l_iHeight >> 16) & 0xFFFF);
l_ucGreen = ((l_iHeight >> 8) & 0xFF);
l_ucBlue = l_iHeight & 0xFF;

and to convert 3 bytes back into a float, with 3 decimal places is as easy as

l_fHeight = ((l_ucRed << 16) | (l_ucGreen << 8) | l_ucBlue) / 1000.0f;



Above is a sample showing grey-scale height maps and their equivalent 24bit height maps. When I first saw the new maps, I thought there was a bug, and there would be rough edges in the terrain, due to the sudden color changes within the texture, however it loads correctly and terrain detail is maintained.

2 comments:

  1. Nice job! What are your plans for the Decade Engine? Do you want to make more varied terrains or procedural terrain or do you have other plans in mind?

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  2. Decade already has a range of procedural terrain generators in place. Plazma, Fault Formation, Perlin Noise, BfN etc..

    My current goal is to improve the planet generation. The first step in this is to move terrain procedural texture generation to the Graphics Card, as this is the slowest part of the process. Once that has been offloaded from the CPU I can concentrate on making better looking terrain, better looking textures etc...

    Alot of the functionality is already present however it needs to be improved. Once nice looking planets are present I will continue along that path with atmosphere, weather, vegetation, water etc...

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