Current State of Terrain Generation

I haven't done any major work on terrain or vegetation lately, but I'm constantly tweaking parameters and fixing minor problems. This post shows screenshots and a video of the current state of tiled terrain mode. The technical details have been mostly covered in previous blog posts, so I won't repeat them all here. Feel free to review some of my earlier posts if you're interested.

I've settled on Simplex noise with domain warping as the primary source of noise for procedural terrain height generation. The noise functions are all user configurable from a text config file in case I want to revisit them later. Take a look at my post from May 2017 for more information. Once the terrain is generated, trees, grass, and other scenery objects are placed on the landscape. The type and distribution of objects depends on terrain height/altitude and slope. These first three screenshots show how the noise algorithm can generate realistic looking rivers and lakes using a parallel algorithm where all height values are computed independently. Note that I'm using a 2D sine function here to form a grid of unique islands within an infinite ocean. This is why the terrain is often bordered by water. There's no technical reason why I have to use islands; the generation and rendering system works fine with an infinite forest. I just like the look and feel of islands.

Procedurally generated terrain with sandy lake surrounded by grass, plants, and trees.

Rivers aren't explicitly generated or properly connected based on water flow. They're just the product of narrow ravines produced by the domain warping function. All of the water is drawn at a constant Z height without regard for interior (lakes) vs. exterior (ocean) water. I've experimented with specialized river generation algorithms, but so far I haven't gotten them to work well in tiled terrain mode. In particular, there are heightmap seams at the borders between tiles (which are generated independently). River generation for infinite heightmaps is very difficult.

Procedurally generated terrain with a river that happens to appear.

I've switched from deciduous trees to pine trees in the next two images. 3DWorld can cycle through four tree modes using the F5 key: none, deciduous, pine, and mixed deciduous/pine/palm. In mixed mode, palm trees are placed near the water line, pine trees are placed on mountains, and deciduous trees are placed in between. This provides more vegetation variety, at the cost of increased generation time for new tiles and increased rendering time due to more draw calls. The increased generation time is due to calling multiple tree distribution functions per tile. The increased rendering time comes from extra draw calls and shader state setting for each visible tile.

Hilly terrain with lakes and pine trees.

I used the realtime terrain editing feature of 3DWorld described here to cover almost the entire surface of the ground above the water line with pine trees. I believe there are around 500K trees on the island and 50-100K trees visible in the screenshot below. 3DWorld uses 2D texture billboards to draw distant trees using only one quad (two triangles) each, which allows this scene to be drawn in realtime at 200 Frames Per Second (FPS). It's also possible to zoom out and create a larger landmass that contains 2M trees, 500K of which are in view, which can be drawn at over 60 FPS. This scene looks more like a dense pine forest, though the underlying terrain can hardly be seen.

Forest covered by around 100K pine trees placed with a large editing brush.

I recently optimized palm tree drawing using hardware instancing + Vertex Buffer Objects (VBOs) on the GPU. This allowed me to adjust the view distance of palm trees so that they're visible to the far fog distance, almost out to the horizon. Unlike pine trees, palm trees aren't usually rotationally symmetric about the Z (up) axis. I haven't been able to get billboards to work well with them. Therefore, each one is drawn in native polygon format using 20 palm fronds = 40 quads = 80 triangles each. In addition, trunks are drawn at various Levels of Detail (LODs) from single lines to 32-sided cylinders consisting of 32 quads = 64 triangles each. This allows me to draw more than 10K palm trees at over 100 FPS, as shown in the image below.

Tens of thousands of palm trees drawn out to the horizon at 143 FPS.

To finish off the screenshot gallery, I'll add an image of a sunset with long shadows and water reflections. If you look carefully, shadow maps are only used for nearby terrain tiles. You can tell which trees have shadows by looking at the lighting changes for distant trees. Terrain drawn beyond the shadow distance uses a more efficient, precomputed, low-resolution ambient occlusion lighting texture. These two modes are linearly blended to make a smooth transition for the player.

This is required to save GPU memory and CPU time for shadow map generation. I haven't used Cascaded Shadow Maps (CSMs) here because the overhead of drawing the scene multiple times (once per cascade) is too high, especially for the trees. Note that rendering tree billboards into the shadow map doesn't look correct; I have to use the full 3D polygon model of each tree, which is slow. There are a lot of polygons in all of those tree models! This is why I decided to precompute a separate static shadow map for each nearby tile instead.

Sunset on procedurally generated landscape and vegetation showing tree shadows and water reflections.

Finally, here is a video where I walk around the terrain and view some deciduous trees up close. You can watch me walk through a river similar to the one featured in the second image above. Then I enable flight mode and fly across the terrain at high speed. This demonstrates how quickly tiles can be generated as the player moves around in the world. In reality the framerate is a bit erratic, which can't actually be seen from a video played back at a fixed 60 FPS. The frame rate drops during frames where more than one tile needs to be generated, and the GPU must split its time between tile generation and scene rendering. In the end, I change the time of day. The sun goes down and the moon comes up, making interesting light reflections in the water.

This video shows that the grass blades are more than single triangles now when viewed from close up. This is a relatively new feature that was visible in some of my grass/tree fire screenshots but maybe not mentioned until now. I implemented this using tessellation shaders on the GPU. That's also how water waves are implemented in tiled terrain mode.

That's all for this post. Next time I'll probably talk about erosion simulation and water flow. I've experimented with these in the past but never mentioned them in the blog. I already have some interesting screenshots prepared. I haven't gotten erosion to work for infinite terrain tiles though. It currently only supports a single square tile at a time. I wonder if I'll be able to fix this in time for the next post.