3D Terrain Simulation

An interactive 3D terrain simulation, featuring user controls to move around the scene and an editable terrain mesh that updates in real-time.

Real-Time Mesh Editing

Perlin Noise Terrain Generation

Mesh Simplification using Varying Voxel Resolutions

Technical aspects of this implementation include:

• Terrain mesh generation using Perlin Noise with varying Level of Detail (L.O.D)
• Procedurally generated trees that flow with the terrain as it is edited.
• Procedurally generated clouds using the Marching Cubes algorithm and Perlin Noise.
• Mesh simplification with varying voxel resolutions.
• Ability to edit the terrain mesh by raising or excavating certain areas.
• The terrain displays different textures depending on the height of the mesh at any given point.
• Interactive flying camera that lets the user move around the scene.

Prerequisites

• OpenGL v3.3
• CMake
• C++11 compiler

The recommended way to build this project is using CMake, so the best structure for the project files is create a dedicated build directory in the root of the project.

git clone https://github.com/tessapower/3d-terrain.git
cd 3d-terrain
mkdir build
cd build
# Replace "Visual Studio XX" with your preferred IDE and version
cmake -G "Visual Studio XX" ..\

After following the above instructions, the directory structure will look like this:

Project Structure

3d-terrain
├───build
│   ├───bin # Executable directory
│   ├───CMakeFiles
│   ├───ext
│   ├───res
│   ├───src
│   └───x64
├───ext           # External libraries, included for simplicity
├───res           # Asset/Texture files & a self-contained project for shaders
│   ├───assets
│   ├───shaders
│   └───textures
└───src
    ├───cgra      # CGRA350 Framework source code
    ├───clouds    # Cloud model source code
    ├───mesh      # Code related to editing or simplifying a mesh
    ├───terrain   # Terrain model source code
    ├───trees     # Procedurally generated trees source code
    └───utils     # Utility classes used throughout the project

Interacting with the Program

Keyboard/Mouse Controls

Key	Action
W	Zoom In (Forwards)
S	Zoom Out (Backwards)
A	Pan Left
D	Pan Right
Middle Mouse Click + Hold	Rotate camera

GUI Controls

Voxel Settings

Control	Description
Voxel Size	Changes the amount of points sampled of the original mesh
IsoLevel	How far away from the mesh a voxel point must be for it to be considered "solid"
Smooth Normals	Toggles Smoothed Normals on/off
Debugging (Menu)	Allows for visualisation of different steps in the simplification process of the Bunny
Cloud Threshold	The threshold the noise value needs to pass to become a solid cloud
Cloud Fade out	The distance from the edge of the voxel grid that the cloud starts to fade out on the Y axis to prevent hard edges

Mesh Editing and Terrain

Control	Description
Radius	Changes Radius of terrain manipulation
Strength	Changes Strength of terrain manipulation
Grass/Mud Height	Changes at what height the Grass/Mud Textures will appear
Mud/Rocks Height	Changes at what height the Mud/Rocks Textures will appear
Heightmap Scale	Changes intensity of heightmap
Normal Map	Toggles on or off the normal map
Raise/Excavate	Switches Mode to either Raise or Excavate Terrain
Deform	Raises or Excavates the currently selected terrain
Octaves	Number of times the noise values are iterated over
Lacunarity	Affects the frequency of the noise
Persistence	Affects the amplitude of the noise
Height	Scales the height of the heightmap
Repeats	Determines how many "tiles" the heightmap can repeat for
Seed	Allows the permutation map to become seeded for deterministic randomness
Perlin/Flat	Switches Mode to generate either flat or Perlin based Terrain
Recreate Terrain	Regenerates Terrain with new values

Tree Settings

Control	Description
Spooky Mode	Toggles showing tree foliage
New Tree	Generates a new base tree
Print Tree	Prints a list to stdout of every branch in the tree and the information about that branch