Browsing by Subject "Terrain editing"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Open Access
Editing heightfield using history management and 3D widgets
(IEEE, 2009-09) Yalçın, M. Aydın; Çapin, Tolga K.
In virtual environments, terrain is generally modeled by heightfield, a 2D structure. To be able to create desired terrain geometry, software editors for this specific task have been developed. The graphics hardware, data structures and rendering techniques are developing fast to open up new possibilities to the user and terrain editor functionalities are following such improvements (such as real-time lighting updates during editing operations and multi-texture blending). Yet, current terrain editors mostly fail to give the user feedback about their actions and also fail to help the users understand and undo the editing operations on the terrain. The aim of this study is to investigate the 3d-widget based visualization of possible editing (sculpturing) actions on terrain and to help user undo previous operations. © 2009 IEEE.
Open Access
A hybrid representation for modeling, interactive editing, and real-time visualization of terrains with volumetric features
(Taylor and Francis Ltd., 2014) Koca, Çetin; Güdükbay, Uğur
Terrain rendering is a crucial part of many real-time applications. The easiest way to process and visualize terrain data in real time is to constrain the terrain model in several ways. This decreases the amount of data to be processed and the amount of processing power needed, but at the cost of expressivity and the ability to create complex terrains. The most popular terrain representation is a regular 2D grid, where the vertices are displaced in a third dimension by a displacement map, called a heightmap. This is the simplest way to represent terrain, and although it allows fast processing, it cannot model terrains with volumetric features. Volumetric approaches sample the 3D space by subdividing it into a 3D grid and represent the terrain as occupied voxels. They can represent volumetric features but they require computationally intensive algorithms for rendering, and their memory requirements are high. We propose a novel representation that combines the voxel and heightmap approaches, and is expressive enough to allow creating terrains with caves, overhangs, cliffs, and arches, and efficient enough to allow terrain editing, deformations, and rendering in real time.