Introduction
For this project you will implement a terrain rendering system using the Chunked LOD algorithm. The project is divided into two parts; you can find the write up for them on Ed. This page has links to various resources that you might find useful for the project (particularly the second part).
Test Maps
The following is a list of test maps; follow the links to get more information.
Resources
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Rendering Massive Terrains using Chunked Level of Detail Control, by Thatcher Ulrich, 2002. This paper is the original description of the algorithm used in the project.
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Frustum Culling, by Dion Picco, 2003. This webpage discusses aspects of frustum culling.
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Cascaded Shadow Maps, by Rouslan Dimitrov, 2007. This NVIDIA white paper describes a technique for shadow mapping scenes with large depth ranges, such as terrains.
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Rendering Countless Blades of Waving Grass, byt Kurt Pelzer, 2004. Chapter 7 of the GPU Gems book, which describes a technique for rendering grass using the GPU.
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GPU Rainfall, by Pierre Rousseau et al, 2008. A paper that describes various advanced techniques for rendering rain on a GPU in realtime.
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Procedural Fractal Terrains, by Ken Musgrave, 2003. A paper by Ken Musgrave about synthesizing heightfield terrain using fractal noise. These techniques might be used to add detail geometry to a scene.
Documentation
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Group Project Map Format. This short note describes the format of maps.
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A Note on Push Constants. This short note describes how to use Vulkan’s "push constants" to implement uniforms in your shader programs.