A real-time procedural terrain rendering engine built with OpenGL. It leverages the power of the GPU by using Compute Shaders for noise generation and Tessellation Shaders.
- Fully GPU-Driven Pipeline: The entire terrain is generated and rendered on the GPU, minimizing CPU overhead, taking ~5-10ms to generate a map
- Procedural Generation: Utilizes a compute shader to generate heightmaps with perlin noise, and variations (domain-warp, fractal brownian motion)
- Dynamic Level of Detail (LOD): Employs Hardware Tessellation Shaders to dynamically generate a high-resolution mesh from a simple base grid, allowing for vast and detailed landscapes with minimal performance impact.
- Advanced Procedural Shading: The fragment shader colors the terrain based on a combination of:
- Altitude: A smooth gradient blending between water, sand, grass, forest, rock, and snow.
- Slope: Steeper surfaces are realistically rendered as exposed rock.
- Atmospheric Effects: Includes toggleable fog and atmospheric scattering to enhance realism and depth perception.
- Particle-Based Hydraulic Erosion: Implements the particle-based hydraulic erosion method by Hans Theobald Beyer (2015)
- Real-time Shadows: Implemented using shadow-mapping
| Screenshot | Preview |
|---|---|
| Terrain Sample 1 |  |
| Terrain Sample 2 |  |
| Perlin-Based Generation |  |
| After Erosion |  |
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Hydraulic Erosion: Exploring and implementing a hydraulic erosion simulation to create more realistic riverbeds and terrain.
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Texture Mapping: Blend detail textures (rock, grass, sand) in the fragment shader instead of solid colors for higher fidelity.
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Realistic Rendering: using different techniques to generate a realistic terrain (shadowmaps, skybox, PCG trees...)
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Bugs: need to deal with the directionality of perlin noise, which has been causing weird artifacts
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END GOAL: Make the terrain a portable api that generates an interactble mesh, which can be used in a world-simulation project (future!!)