Generating Complex Procedural Terrains Using the GPU (2008)

Generating Complex Procedural Terrains Using the GPU (2008)(http.developer.nvidia.com)

67 points by younata 12 years ago | 15 comments

voltagex_ 12 years ago |

Tangentially related:

http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/morenoise/morenoise.htm

http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/fog/fog.htm

http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/compilingsmall/compilings...

and the finished product is "Elevated" on http://iquilezles.org/prods/

TacticalCoder 12 years ago | |

Somehow I do find that "Elevated" in 4 KB beats all these 50 bytes spreadsheet in JavaScript that have made it lately on HN! (4 KB, including the music)

voltagex_ 12 years ago | | |

There's difficulty in both but I've always had respect for the demoscene.

highCs 12 years ago |

This demo drew attention a lot in the game industry. Also, there is no mention to it in the nvidia paper but another noteworthy voxel terrain demo was the cave demo (voxlap engine) from Ken Silverman (3D realms / Duke Nukem 3D 'Build' editor) [1].

[1] http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap/voxlap03.htm

jheriko 12 years ago |

its also possible to achieve similar effects using whittaker iteration as a 'sloppy but fast' alternative to the sphere tracing/distance field approach

there is not much good reference on it though (which is why i am compelled to self link)

http://software.intel.com/sites/billboard/article/star-chart... http://jheriko-rtw.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/whittakers-method-...

its less well known by far... Steven Wittens came across it, and I shamelessly nicked it, back when we were doing AVS presets for Winamp. Speaking of Winamp, back then Geiss (the author of this article) created Monkey - it used D3D and hardware acceleration iirc, but also rendered an isosurface similar to the method described in this article.

It was an interesting period of actual innovation in those days...

femto 12 years ago |

Another take on the marching cubes algorithm is here:

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~marc/tutorial/node130.html

It more clearly states that marching cubes is a method of converting volumetric data into a bounding surface.

mef51 12 years ago |

This looks super interesting. Does anyone know any other good resources for graphics programming?

pushedx 12 years ago | |

http://www.iquilezles.org/www/index.htm

I come back to Inigo's site every few months to add to my appreciation of the demoscene. It isn't like stage magic, it's even more amazing when you see how the trick is done. He was hired by Pixar in 2009. I'm assuming they recruited him.

vilya 12 years ago | | |

There's an article in Computer Graphics World about the procedural terrain and foliage generation in Pixar's Brave which apparently Inigo Quilez was behind:

http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2012/Volume-35-Issue-4-J...

It's a bit light on technical details, but pretty cool to read about.

kunil 12 years ago | | |

This looks awesome, thank you

leohutson 12 years ago | |

This is a pretty cool resource:

http://www.scratchapixel.com/

binarycrusader 12 years ago |

See also Eric Lengyel's take on this which he calls the Transvoxel Algorithm:

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

svantana 12 years ago |

Very nice, but is this practical for games? What about collision detection, AI players etc? Or would you use it mainly for backgrounds, skies and such?

leokun 12 years ago |

I wonder if this is now No Man's Sky works.

ramidarigaz 12 years ago | |

I don't know what tech No Man's Sky is using, but Voxel Farm[0] does something very similar (it's being used in Everquest Next and StarForge among other things). However, instead of marching cubes it uses dual contouring which produces nicer results. Also, it was made by one guy. His blog is amazing: http://procworld.blogspot.com/

[0]http://voxelfarm.com/vfweb/index.html