Creating destructible terrain?

Voxels
Marching Cubes algorithm
Octree

Sorry, probably not very helpful

Problem is when searching for these terms i only get cube like terrains.. like minecraft. I want regular smooth ones.

Hi, it should be possible to have high resolution, large destructible terrains in real-time. Look up GPU GEMS 3, Chapter 1. Generating Complex Procedural Terrains by Ryan Geiss. Its quite interessing article, hope it gives you more relevant information.

That looks promising. Any idea how fast it performs?

Also, it says procedural generation, but i want to model the terrain manually.

Edit: I just read the article, and yes i can use a 3D texture instead of a heightmap to create the terrain. Perfect . Now the only question i have is if it has a fast performance. Anyone?

Edit2: It just occured to me that the density texture would have to be ginormous....

Hi, sorry but I really have no idea. Thought it was a good article that actually shows smooth terrain with voxels and how it could be done.
I guess the next stage after creating something would be to try and figure out how to manipulate the terrain and build the tools yourself.

Even on that youtube video, the terrain was already created, then the person manipulated it.

That looks promising. Any idea how fast it performs?

Also, it says procedural generation, but i want to model the terrain manually.

Edit: I just read the article, and yes i can use a 3D texture instead of a heightmap to create the terrain. Perfect . Now the only question i have is if it has a fast performance. Anyone?

Don't count on decent performance for this approach with a naive implementation, this will require some serious effort and skill to pull off
Also, be very careful with 3D textures since they can get really massive really fast in terms of data-usage, and you really don't want to re-upload such a texture to the GPU all too often.

[quote name='Waaayoff' timestamp='1338833145' post='4946176']
That looks promising. Any idea how fast it performs?

Also, it says procedural generation, but i want to model the terrain manually.

Edit: I just read the article, and yes i can use a 3D texture instead of a heightmap to create the terrain. Perfect . Now the only question i have is if it has a fast performance. Anyone?

Don't count on decent performance for this approach with a naive implementation, this will require some serious effort and skill to pull off
Also, be very careful with 3D textures since they can get really massive really fast in terms of data-usage, and you really don't want to re-upload such a texture to the GPU all too often.
[/quote]

Yeah i realized that in my second edit. I think i will just use normal terrain for now, and maybe convert it to a destructible one when i am more experienced with this stuff.

You can find a lot of information about voxel terrain here:

http://www.terathon.com/voxels/

Even though this page talks mostly about LOD, the paper first covers the construction of the main voxel terrain. You can find a real-time editor for all this stuff in the C4 Engine.

My terrain technique is destructible
http://skytiger.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/xna-large-terrain/
You can implement a procedural destruction that runs on the CPU side and GPU side
On XNA the expensive bit is copying the heightmap (and color map) for each update