I have opted for a database of terrain objects, generated positions/colors/scale for each instance from a distribution map and several tweakable parameters, outputs to some instance data file which can be loaded or later on streamed and instances being updated around the camera, when needed. The problem is to find the right instances around the camera radius from lets say 1 million objects (trees, grass patches,rocks,detail objects), of course you cannot search through all them, computing distances for each one, so I figured out that a quad tree will help it, assigning instance index lists to leaves, wrote a generic quad-tree class, which can take user specified callbacks to subdivide and query for data, so you can use it in any quad-tree-worthy feature you might have.
Archive for February, 2010
Techdemo: Vegetation rendering
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010COLLADA deception
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010“Wow! COLLADA is so great!” were my first words about COLLADA, after a brief research made 
. But devil is in the details. COLLADA is a nice format that can store everything, let me emphasize, everything. I have use it for quite some time, its good when you use the same DCC tool and the same exporter for DAE, but when that DAE comes from various DCC tools and also exporters, things get nasty, of course it can be an escuse for a lame importer, but still, the format is too loose for game development at least, and now I’m limited at exporting only the mesh data, skeletons get complicated a little, etc., so in a moment of “professional rage” I have started an open source game asset file format specification and its exporters for MAX, Maya and XSI, plus a simple import/load library, called .GSCENE , found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/gscene (work in progress of course).
If you dont believe me about COLLADA, then start using it, good luck
Techdemo: Grass in the wind
Monday, February 1st, 2010The grass looks good, added layers of grass, basically the terrain can have 3 types of instanced things on it: grass (blades looking at camera, on a radius around the camera ), trees (they have special features, like LOD with impostors, physics, etc) objects ( like soda cans, broken branches, detail objects ), so you can have many layers of these objects on the terrain. More info soon. Posted a small work in progress video: