Generating Complex Procedural Terrains Using the GPU (2008) (opens in new tab)

(http.developer.nvidia.com)

67 pointsyounata12y ago15 comments

15 comments

voltagex_12y 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/

TacticalCoder12y 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_12y ago

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

highCs12y 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

jheriko12y 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...

femto12y 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.

mef5112y ago

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

pushedx12y 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.

vilya12y 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.

kunil12y ago

This looks awesome, thank you

leohutson12y ago

This is a pretty cool resource:

http://www.scratchapixel.com/

binarycrusader12y ago

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

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

svantana12y 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?

leokun12y ago

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

ramidarigaz12y 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

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15 comments

voltagex_12y 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/

TacticalCoder12y 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_12y ago

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

highCs12y ago

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

jheriko12y 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-...

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

femto12y 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.

mef5112y ago

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

pushedx12y ago

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

vilya12y 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.

kunil12y ago

This looks awesome, thank you

leohutson12y ago

This is a pretty cool resource:

http://www.scratchapixel.com/

binarycrusader12y ago

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

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

svantana12y 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?

leokun12y ago

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

ramidarigaz12y ago

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

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