Focus on 3D Terrain Programming [With CDROM]

by Trent Polack

Welcome to the world of 3D terrain programming. Now you can break away from the computer game mold of lackluster backgrounds and create amazing landscapes for your characters to explore. Focus On 3D... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1592000282
• ISBN13: 9781592000289
• Release Date: December 2002
• Publisher: Course Technology
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.7" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Great review

After programming for quite a few years, naturally the topic of terrain rendering came upon me eventually. Before reading this book, I had researched every LOD algorithm covered in the book; however, what makes this book great is the ease at which the algorithms are described, thus making implementation all the more simpler. While covering several tessellation algorithms, the book extends its literature by discussing and providing much sample source code for great effects that many beginners would be lost in understanding of, such as liquid simulation, terrain lighting and texturing, sky domes, etc. Although, the book certainly isn't for the fairly advanced graphics programmers, it's great for an aspiring coder.

Well done on all counts.

This is an excellent book, well worth purchasing if you're interested in terrain rendering and don't have a good idea where to start, or have never coded a terrain engine before.It starts out with simple explanations of the basics of terrain rendering. Many of you will probably be familiar with the techniques in the first portion of the book.The meat of the book, however, evaluates ,in a non biased fashion, three different CLOD algorithms. Along with the whitepapers included on the CD after reading this book, you should have a throuough understanding of how to implement these algorithms yourself.The code included on the CD is well written, and very concise. If you're a hardcore C++ programmer, you may be irked by the lack of fancy template usage, or C++ streams; but the way the author has structured everything makes it very easy to understand the code whether you are familiar with C or C++.The last chapter is a nice add-on. If you are familiar with techniques such as sky-boxes and particle engines, you probably won't find it very useful, but for the uninitiated it could prove to be quite useful.What this book will not teach you, however, is API specific details. It assumes you are comfortable using your API of choice. It will not teach you any 3D math either. You should be fairly comfortable with matrix and vector operations/basic linear algebra before attempting to code the algorithms discussed in the book.It's not a book for the graphically-uninitiated, but if you're allready familiar with either Direct3D, or OpenGL and you understand some basic 3D math (rotation and scaling with matrices, vector normals and such) it's an excellent book, well suited for teaching you terrain rendering.

Trent M. Polack is a good Author.

I really like the author's approach to this topic. For a beginner like me, it can be hard to grasp some of the ideas that are outlined in this book, yet the young author, a high school senior, seems to have a good grasp on the subject matter. This may be because he doesn't try to sound overly intelligent, like some over-zealous writers, and just puts it in simple terms that are very easy to understand and follow. I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a great start in terrain programming.

Highly recommend for OGL terrain rendering

I am a new programmer starting out in the world of OpenGL and terrain rendering.I would highly recommend this book to anyone that wants to get into this field, it is a great beginners book on terrain algorithms and passes on experiences with problems that may pop up.nehe.gamedev.net and gametutorials.com while good starting points, do not delve into the detail this book does about terrain algorithms, I guess the reviewer that stated that didn't read past chapter 3.

Excellent Beginner's Guide to 3D Terrain Programming

Wow. Let me just start off with that. I started this book with very little understanding of terrain algorithms. Now I know 4 major approaches to terrain and how to implement them, with many different possibilities for texturing, lighting and culling. If you are a beginner in the world of 3D terrain, then this book is the best one you can have right now. It can take you from a complete beginner with some basic openGL knowledge, like I was, to someone who knows how to write a very effective 3D terrain engine. This book is NOT for advanced 3D terrain programmers. It will be very useful to a beginner, like I was. If you know how to do 4 chapters' worth of this book- the basics and one of the more advanced algorithms- then it's not worth it. If you know any less, I'd strongly recommend it! It teaches the main algorithms that have stood the test of time in 3D Terrain Programming, and ONE NEW ALGORITHM THAT'S SO CUTTING EDGE, IT HASN'T EVEN BEEN OFFICIALLY PUBLISHED YET- ROAM 2.O, the next iteration of possibly the most major CLOD algorithm yet developed!Here are the contents:IntroductionCh2. Fractal Terrain Generation, Heightmap Loading/Unloading, building a base terrain class and a Brute Force implementation.Ch3. Texture mapping, procedural texture generation, and detail texture mapping.Ch4. Height-based lighting, hardware lighting and when you shouldn't use it on terrain (too much normal recalculation in CLOD), lightmapping and slope lighting.The three major CLOD algorithms:Ch5. Geomipmapping theory and implementation.Ch6. Quadtree theory and implementation.Ch7. ROAM, improvements to ROAM, new ROAM theory and the implementation of ROAM 2.0- the latest in CLOD. This book culls together information that is scattered over the web, various books and conference articles into 203 pages of very useful information. It teaches you 4 major approaches to terrain: brute force, the initial algorithm for all developers, and 3 advanced Continuous Level Of Detail algorithms. A beginner would spend a month, easily, finding all of the resources to learn this material. Then when you want a quick reference, you have to rehunt for all of this material, which can waste a half hour or an hour. I read this book in 3 days. Whenever I want a quick reference, I grab it off the desk next to my computer. You be the judge.