As I hinted on in my last post, I will be discussing the implementation of culling for planet terrain rendering. When the camera is close to the surface, a lot of the terrain geometry is not visible, so it would not be sensible wasting CPU time on generating it or GPU time on drawing it.
Along with the following picture, my video from last week shows quite well what is going on:
Here only the necessary geometry is generated. The implementation to achieve this uses two methods combined: backface culling and frustum culling. I will discuss both methods here along with the implementation…