Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Since I have a lot less to do in school now, I've started working on the engine again.

Today I finished the terrain LOD system. I'm using the popular GeoMipMapping technique and it works very well. To the left you can see two screenshots taken from the same viewport. The top picture shows brute-force rendering of the terrain and ~2 million triangles are drawn. In the bottom picture the LOD is activated and only ~45k triangles are drawn. That's only ~2% of the original triangles!

It's pretty hard to see any difference in the pictures, but if you look at the distant mountains you are able to see that the bottom picture misses some of the detail.

When the camera is moving it's sometimes possible to notice some popping when the terrain patches changes LOD but still I think the result is quite good for such a simple technique.

1 comment:

/dr Hossmo said...

Hi there!
nice to see that you're online with the engine development again :)

It's fun to watch the progress.

Did you see this on slashdot yesterday?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/06/03/22/0321241.shtml

Maybe LOD is yesterdays technique? ;)