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curved surface possible?

Started by AbelCorver Feb 26, 2008 at 4:52 AM 1 replies 800+ views

Original Post

Feb 26, 2008 at 4:52 AM

Hy, I want to create a landscape. I'm currently using squares, but this looks too bumpy. It also costs too much memory to create a nice landscape. Is it possible to create a curved surface, or do I have to create this effect with just a lot normal squares? I hope I explaned enough, however an image of what I mean (sorry, I'm not an artist): an image I actually creating the landscape in Java3D, but Java3D uses openGL, so I thought that I could post this message here. Thanks in advance!

LachlanL

Feb 26, 2008 at 5:40 AM

Hey, I couldn't look at your image. I got a "forbidden" message.

But to answer your question, pretty much all 3D graphics that are rendered in 3D use triangles. Triangles are flat, so in order to make the surface look curved, yes, you will need to use a lot of them.

There are some tricks that you can use to make your surfaces look more curved or natural than they really are, such as using vertex normals instead of face normals for lighting (so the lighting doesn't look flat and faceted), or normal mapping to make the surface look more detailed than it is when lit.

As for adding more geometry, you could try using curves like Catmull-ROM and tesselate to a higher level to give a smoother look. Or just use higher-resolution heightmaps.

Kippesoep

Feb 26, 2008 at 5:53 AM

And, in the unlikely case that the hardware supports it, you could use geometry shaders. This is supported through extensions only atm, check out the nvidia documentation for GL_EXT_geometry_shader4, for instance.

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