Planet Renderer – Week 5 – 6: Height, Triangular CDLOD

I missed last weeks post because I was writing a research paper about the graduation work and didn’t get around to updating my blog since. You can read the paper here, I go over a lot of the topics I discussed in previous posts, but also discuss some new things. Aside from that I made the terrain sample a height map in the vertex shader to offset the height of the triangles appropriately. I also made sure that the backface culling doesn’t cull terrain with potential peaks that loom over the horizon. This video shows the results quite nicely:

The more interesting change was added last week:
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Planet Renderer – Week 4: Culling

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:
Frustum and backface culling planet terrain rendering opengl c++

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…

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Planet Renderer – Week 3.5: Terrain LOD

This is a bit of a delayed update, mainly because my computer broke down and I needed to reinstall all software.

Regardless I modified what I had in week 2 to display terrain with level of detail. You can see the results here for yourself:

Apart from that, I also added textures and text rendering with sprite fonts.

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Planet Renderer – Week 2: Basic OpenGL Framework

Gif showing icosphere subdivision program in opengl c++

This week I have implemented a basic OpenGL framework for future application of the planet renderer. It can be found on Github, which will be frequently be updated to  keep track of the progress of the rendering tech.

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Planet Renderer – Week1: LOD Terrain Research

I have put some time into researching the topic of generating terrain at the size of planets with level of detail dependant on the distance of the camera.

There are a lot of different approaches to solving this problem, and it is already clear that I won’t have time to test every one of them myself, but I have identified some reoccuring themes during my time scavenging the internet, and I willl put together a summary of that. Continue reading “Planet Renderer – Week1: LOD Terrain Research”

Planet Renderer

Announcement: Starting this week, every sunday I will be writing a blog post about the progress of my graduation work.

The topic is researching and implementing the creation of a real time planet renderer, with the deadline at some point next January. This is a topic I have been wanting to approach for a while now, so I have been pushing to be allowed to implement this topic as my graduation work.

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