Spherical Heightmap based Planet

http://twitter.com/victorporof/

This is a tech demo for a planet library I'm currently working on - it's far from complete, so any critical attitude is encouraged. The vertices are actually deformed based on a heightmap, the lighting is deferred and surface is risen/lowered based on the real height. No bump maps are used. Specular maps are created dynamically.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• xna
• planet
• heightmap
• spherical
• photorealistic
• scene
• library
• pixel
• shader
• massive
• terrain
• realtime
• texturing
• VBO
• dynamic
• vertex
• buffer
• arrays
• heights

[Krazykaveman]

Looking good! It could use some atmospheric scattering though.

[victorporof]

@Krazykaveman Of course :) The purpose was only to demonstrate the vertex displacement from the heightmap. But thank you for the suggestion.

[sodafountan]

stunning.... this is very impressive! did you learn this on your own or did you go to school for it?

[victorporof]

Thanks.

There's no school or college in my country that teaches this sort of stuff as far as I'm aware of (unfortunately)... I've learned to do everything myself, starting ~3 years ago :)

[alin116]

as I was saying, the terrain looks like it's 30-40km tall. but that can be fixed. and it's a bit too glossy. terrain doesn't shine like that. the water looks ok though...it might help if you take a look at a photo of Earth taken from space:)

[victorporof]

i know, but it's a tech demo, so things are exaggerated; if they weren't, no one would notice the fact that it's a heightmap there and no bump maps.

[wangtang32000]

awesome mapping

and this music is lovely, what is this song called?

[drzendoom]

The problem I have been thinking about is how do you deal with the problem of projecting a 2d heightmap onto a spherical planet? (or oblique sphereoid if you have that talent)

[Littlemeister]

@victorporof Is there a possibillity that I could take a part of sweden (my town) and put into an engine ... lets say Cryengine or autodesk? I need the height and the landscape"shape" for an architect project. It would been very cool and much better to work with the enviroment in 3d too see how the new architecture will fit in. 

[TheJunaidStuff]

its freakin' awesome, the only thing missing is water ripples and Alas! what if they were animated. by the way How did you do height mapping of a Sphere. There is two option Cartesian Coordinates to Spherical Coordinate Conversion or you have Formula to translate Long\Lat into 3D (x,y,z) coordinates. Please help me with this i am failing in both techniques

[MrRileyI777]

I am just getting into making planets myself.

But I was wondering. What software did you use?

[PICLex]

How does it look when you are on the surface?

[Nyphur]

How did you handle the planetary poles? I did a similar thing where I projected a square heightmap-based terrain into a camera-facing hemisphere. The problem was mapping points on a square texture to points on a sphere. I ended up faking the poles and restricting the player's viewing angle so he never sees the very top or bottom of the map.

[TheJafhar]

looking very very awesome

[metk0o]

This is kinda new for me but it looks really good. Which program do you use to make this?

[MultiIPwnage]

@victorporof

Please will you make a tutorial on this?