This page is dedicated to volume rendering aimed at terrain. The terrain aspect means, that it's all about huge meshes being displayed with high performance via a level of detail mechanism. Thanks to volume rendering, caves, cliffes, holes and similar geometry can be displayed. Also constructive solid geometry gets easy.
Basically, this page describes how the volume component of the graphics engine OGRE is implemented. Head over to the table of contents for more details, best is to start with the introduction of course. Not everything is online yet, but every few days, a new article gets published, just follow the blog below to stay up to date.
If you like this work and want to support it, feel free to donate something or click on any Flattr button!
After the introduction, the first article about the needed steps in Dual Marching Cubes is online, generating the Octree!
And beside that, a little donation button sneaked in at the front page as a possibility to directly support this page and this project.
I think, it’s also interesting on this site to post some news arround the ongoing development of the Volume Component of OGRE which is the implementation of all (currently described and upcoming) articles on this site.
Since today, realtime editing of the terrain is possible!
This is the changelog since the last push to OGRE:
Of course, everything behind it will become some dedicated articles in the future.
After having nicely textured Marching Cubes geometry, it’s time to start with something better, Dual Marching Cubes. But at some point, Marching Cubes will play a role again, hence the name Dual Marching Cubes.
A small introduction to this algorithm is now online.
So far, the triangles are plain white and boring. But now, they get a nice and realistic look with triplanar texturing with normal mapping!
Putting it all together, it’s now possible to draw actually volume terrain, but not very efficient (yet).
The next article is online, it’s about Marching Cubes.
With this, a point is reached where the first triangles are on the screen, have fun!
The mesh is still plain white, but the goal is not visualizing the North Pole, so a nice terrain shader is the topic of the upcoming article.
On the second day, this homepage gets it’s first content update on the march towards the whole theory of a volume renderer with LOD:
The very first density function has now an article. It’s the classic discrete grid being used in the original Marching Cubes paper for example. And the terrain sample of OGREs volume component uses it, too.
The article contains quite a lot of formulas, but don’t let that scare you away, they are all pretty simple on their own.
Hello world from the Volume GFX page! This page is dedicated to volume rendering in realtime.
A volume terrain
I wrote my masterthesis about exactly this topic and participated at the Google Summer of Code at OGRE with the implementation. In the upcoming release 1.9 of OGRE, everything is included as a component! This page will give you the whole background how everything works behind the scenes. The first idea was to write one or more papers from the Thesis, but I think this way is nicer and more accessible. The cites and literature are also maintained, so you can dig deeper if you like.
As the development of the volume component is still active, this page goes far further than the masterthesis.
The structure is a blog and a series of in depth articles. It starts with just an introduction and the volume model. But from now on, every few days a new article gets released or existing ones updated. Each new article or update gets its own blog post to keep you updated, so stay tuned.
Feel free to hit the Flattr button if you like this work and want to support it.
