Tag Archives: c++

OpenGL 4.0 Planet Rendering using Tessellation

Description:

This project is based on the article Making Worlds by Steven Wittens, I recommend reading it first if you’re interested in planet rendering. The two main differences with this approach is that it’s not procedural but rather data based, and that it’s using tessellation instead of quadtree for LODing.

This image shows how you can use a normalized cube to make a sphere.

For the tessellation, I simply adapted Florian Boesch’s OpenGL 4 Tessellation to work with a cubic heightmap. It worked pretty much out of the box and allowed the culling to be performed on the GPU. The heightmap is generated in World Machine using a 2:1 width-to-height ratio, I then open it in Photoshop to apply some panoramic transformations. The whole process is described here. At first I was using HDRShop 1.0.3 just like in the tutorial but was only able to output the result as a RGB32 image. This loss of precision resulted in some rather nasty stepping artifacts when mapped on a terrain. I then moved to Flexify 2 and was able to output a proper 16bit greyscale image.

This image shows the final result before being split into tiles.

Known Bugs:

Visible seams at the edge of the tiles, I’ll definitely fix this at some point.
Patches can be culled out when the camera is too near and perpendicular to the terrain, this is related to the view frustum shape.

Tools Used:

Libs Used:

Source:

Builds:

REV1

Media:

Streaming Large World Using KdTree

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Implementation:

This implementation is using the Composite/Visitor Pattern (based on OpenSceneGraph). In order to get descent performance on large scene I had to figure out a way to retrive the nodes closer to the player without having to do a entire scene traversal. I found a solution using kdtree, it goes like this:

When loading the scene, add the position of the nodes that are higher in the scene hierarchy in a kdtree index.
When the scene is loaded, build the kdtree index.
Before traversing the scene, perform a nearest neighbor search based on the player position and build a temporary node holding the result.
Perform the culling stage (CullingVisitor for those familiar with OSG) on the result.
Finally render the scene.

I also split the scene into areas, each holding it’s own kdtree. This way it’s possible to do a quick distance check before doing the actual nearest neighbor search on a area.

Result:

When building a scene you can specify the number of area on the x/z axis and a resolution. To test things out, I made a 8×8 scene with a resolution of 4096, each area holds 8000 “parent” node that each holds 4 children node, giving us a total of 4096000 nodes. The scene is running at an average of ~550 FPS when disabling the actual rendering calls. Right now there’s no frustum culling and I’m rendering the cube using deprecated opengl so I’m getting around ~260 FPS with rendering, it should improve later on). This approach is mostly CPU bound and searching with a radius too large can drastically decrease performance so I’m thinking of holding the nodes that can be seen from far away (a terrain per instance) in a different group in order to keep a far view. Also I’m currently using alpha blending as a fog to avoid nodes popping on the screen. Here’s the result: