Oddlabs Forum

Hi everyone!

First I would like to congratulate the author of the Document "Realtime Synthesis of Eroded Fractal Terrain for Use in Computer Games". I learnt very much things.

So I started to generate my own heightmaps using technics presented on the document. Actually I'm generating heightmaps with the diamond square method, voronoi diagrams, pertubation filter and then thermal erosion. Generated heightmaps look good but when i render them in 3D, I have a huge "visual" problem.


It's look like stairs...

I'm using double for heightmap's height value between 0..1. When I generate bitmaps, I multiply theses values per 255 to get the final color in greyscale so I cast my double as int. Maybe that's the problem.. If someone can help me, that would be great because I'm a bit lost this time

Tkx,

Mini

Very nice render, it's always fun to see others actually implementing and using the stuff I wrote about

The reason why you get terraces in the renders are because you convert your heightmaps to bitmaps and thereby reduce the height resolution from a double to only 256 possible values. If you want to export heightmap data to another program in order to render an image, you will need some other format that retains the full resolution (or at least 16 bits or better per height point). When I wrote the paper, I didn't have this problem because I used the Tribal Trouble game engine to both generate and render the terrains.

Thanks a lot for your answer, now i know how i'll render my terrain . I think I gonna use Alpha channel to store a 16 bits height value . Thanks again

Hi!

Thank to your advice Jacob, I finally rendered my terrain without using a bitmap and that's pretty good now. I still have to smooth borders but it look nice I think