Here's an early shot of my volumetric terrain system in A8. Uses a 2d heightmap and 3D noise to create a full 3d volume which is then polygonised on the fly using the marching cubes method.

Everything is done procedurally, and could be extended to make infinite worlds.

The terrain meshes are normal A8 models and work with collision, physics, shadow maps etc.


free picture upload

wow. how fast is the process and what about rendering performance afterwards? can you post an image showing triangles?

Right now runs at 60+ fps (I have a 2 ghz CPU + radeon r5), except when updating chunks which can make some lagginess. This can be optimized hopefully to smooth things out.

AS you will see in this shot, there is no LOD yet, which should make a difference. World size (xy) is currently 131072*131072... far clip is set to 10000 in this shot

Cool! What happened to your planet exploration game, I assume it's getting an overhaul?

Hi! I intend to use this new system for that..although right now its not planned to be a spherical world---this method could be extended for a spherical (planetary) renderer in several ways. You could have two different systems, a flat terrain and a sphere terrain, and blend between them at a distance. Or I could just make the whole planet a giant volume that gets paged in.

Right now im just trying to concentrate on getting this system optimized.