Hi,
I freshly backed a terrain system for first person cameras I half developed some time ago.
It consists on an equilateral triangled grid that is moved and oriented in reference to a view so its whole mesh is potentially visible does not matter the direction you look at.
The grid is a 180 degrees hexagonal arc of triangles with four fixed LOD steps (12.5%-25%-50% of view range) in a single mesh. It is moved over a fixed grid measured by the size of the triangles of the last lod step (X:2xHeight, Y:Width) in a way that those vertex always fit certain positions so its background hexagonal structure remains unchanged even if the model is moved. Same happens when it is rotated in 60 degrees steps. This last fact encoureged me to try it out.
This model is generated procedurally in reference to the view fustrum and has certain tessellation control so it can be as detailed as desired (2K to 55K tris).
The terrain is created flat and its altitude is computed into its materials vertex shader. The geometry is backed in a volume texture (up to 4x2048x2048x16) that gives a good relative definition for the huge terrain it can be.
I use two vtex channels for world space normals, one for shadow map and altitude in the last. I sample the vtex in a 3x3 gaussian weighted manner so its low height resolution gets disimulated. The normal and shadow maps pixel rates get blurred by the same operation too.
The texture consists on a seamless horizontal sand detail map and a tricked triplanar projected texture for cliff details.
3dgs statisticss states that the most tessellated terrain runs in 0.1 ms in my not that bad nVidiaGTX660.
I built the vtex with an evaluation version of L3DT. Pretty good results but hard and long to learn. These things need hours of automatic and hand made processes. Render a 8K^2 terrain takes hours. The drawing tools are not very good. Bad things for a test&fail learning method. I finally built a 4K^2 texture for this demo (4x1024x1024x16) because I had no patience enough xP
DOWNLOAD DEMO A bit boring (but awesome!) seamless circuit.
mouse -> look around
WSAD -> move around
RF -> camera height
shift -> run
space -> jump
1 -> show normalmap
2 -> show shadowmap
3 -> show cliff details
4 -> show heightmap
