Chris Seieroe

Final Project - Landscape Renderer

Features  |  Yet to be Added  |  Sample Screen shots  |  Program Usage

Features

• Read a height map from a file (8-bit RAW format) that is 1024 x 1024 pixels. Each pixel in the file is represented as a single byte. These values represent the height (y value) of that point in the landscape. A value of 0x0 (black) is the lowest point and 0xFF (white) is the highest point.
• Since rendering every pixel takes a lot of horsepower, you can specify a detail scale. This will skip certain pixels when rendering the height map.
  
• Read a texture from a file (24-bit BMP format). This texture will be applied to the landscape.
• Read a detail texture from a file (24-bit BMP format). This texture is tiled through the landscape to improve visual quality.
  
• Move the camera like in a First-Person-Shooter game.
• Switch between different lighting conditions. Also has a night mode that displays the moon.
• A sky box surrounds the scene. This gives the impression of a world. This also changes to a different scene in night mode.
  
• Volumetric fog. Instead of fog that floods the scene, this only shows fog in the lower portions of the landscape.

Yet to be Added

• Self shadows. This adds shadows from the landscape itself, like mountains casting shadows on the valley below.
• Other environmental effects, like clouds, rain, or lightning.

Sample Screen shots

Night

Night with volumetric fog

Day

Day with detail texture

Day with detail texture and volumetric fog

Program Usage

• To run the program, you must supply 4 command-line arguments
1. step size
• The step size is an integer (preferable a power of 2). This tells the program to use every Nth pixel as a vertex, allowing you to render the scene faster. The preferred size is 4, but it is not recommended that you use anything larger than 16 as it greatly decreases the detail.
  
2. height map filename
3. texture filename
4. detail texture filename
• To move the camera around the scene, drag the mouse around to change where you are looking at. Movement is done with the "wasd" key navigation. The 'w' key moves forward while the 's' key moves backward. The 'a' key sidesteps to the left while the 'd' key sidesteps to the right.
• To toggle the detail texture, press the spacebar.
• To toggle volumetric fog, press the 'f' key.
• To change the lighting modes (and switch to night mode for some of them), press the number keys.
• To quit the program, you can press the 'q' key.