P-152: Virtual World Concept Update 106: Terrain Collision and Texturing

I have fixed the collision issues that I was having with the spherical terrain. It turned out that I was adding the wrong nodes to the collision mesh. I now have reliable collision working. I am only adding a collision mesh to the most detailed LOD, since that is where the player will be standing. I don’t need collision at further distances.

I have also thought a bit about the texturing. My initial idea was to add several materials to the terrain, and use a different vertex and primitive buffer for each. However, this would only allow me to texture the nodes, not the vertices. This means that there would be a noticeable square, blocky boundary between the different material zones. I would not be able to effectively blend between them.

The best thing to do here would be to use a shader. I can apply a single material to the terrain, and map a shader to that material. I can then access the pixel values using the shader and, based on their height, apply a different material to each one.

Shaders are incredibly powerful, (In fact, it is possible to generate terrain using just a shader) and I should also be able to perform all kinds of optimisations, such as blending, lighting, shading, etc etc.

I don’t know a whole lot about shaders, so I will need to research this a bit more before I attempt to implement it.