Procedural terrain generation on the GPU

The mesh is being generated on the GPU by using the geometry shader stream-out feature to implement the marching cubes algorithm. Normal mapping is applied to increase detail on the rather coarse mesh. See http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch01.html for details.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• terrain
• generation
• gpu
• marching
• cubes
• normal
• mapping

[RobertHine]

Very nice :) i did something like this myself a while ago, not using geometry shaders though, it was no where near as advanced or nice as your implementation, am I right in saying you randomly placed spheres to generate the terrain shape itself then subtracted spheres to get the shape?, if not how did you go about it? just a guess as that was what i did and i got a few similar unconnected voxels like at 0:18, at any rate its an awesome video on a very interesting subject :)

[reimarvin]

Thanks for your comment. To answer your questions: the scalar field is generated by simply adding some octaves of noise from a precomputed volume texture. The whole thing is pretty much the same as the NVIDIA guys did with their GeForce 8 launch demo "Cascades". I've added a link to a detailed explanation of their approach in this video's description.

[RobertHine]

whoah, light years ahead of what i did then, very cool, thanks for the link and i'll look forward to more videos :)