Procedural Planet Video
Procedural Planet video showing the space-to-surface transition, as well as the tank driving around a bit. I’m pretty happy with how it looks, but there are a lot of things that still need to be fixed.
Of Tanks and Quad Trees
I needed a bit of a diversion from the planet rendering itself, into something that would give some purpose behind it. Why is the planet there? Well, what better use is there for a planet than driving a tank on it?
GPU Geometry Map Rendering – Part 2
We left off in part 1 talking about the initial failures with my GPU geometry map shader. I did fail to mention that there was a bright spot the first time I ran the new code – it was amazingly fast. So fast I was able to increase the noise octaves from the 5 that would run reasonably well on the CPU up to 30 and still run at well over 60fps. I have to admit that I spent some of that first 18 hour day just roaming around on a barren, reddish planet. That huge improvement in performance made the pain to come well worth it.
So, at the end of part 1 we set up the C# code for executing the geometry map shader. Now let’s take a look at the shader itself.
GPU Geometry Map Rendering – Part 1
I spent the past week moving my procedural planet renderer’s
geometry map creation code from the CPU to the GPU. It didn’t go as smoothly as
I would have liked, but in a way that was a good thing since I gained a much
deeper understanding of some render pipeline things that I had been taking for
granted.
Planet Renderer Screenshots
Going to write up something useful tomorrow, but for now here are a few screenshots…
Procedural Planet Engine Status
Previously I mentioned I was going to do a mulligan on my procedural planet engine. The few hours I’ve worked on it so far have lead to a beautiful new architecture that’s doing most of the same things as before, as well as some major new things, using about 25% of the code.