Book Image

OpenGL Development Cookbook

By : Muhammad Mobeen Movania
Book Image

OpenGL Development Cookbook

By: Muhammad Mobeen Movania

Overview of this book

OpenGL is the leading cross-language, multi-platform API used by masses of modern games and applications in a vast array of different sectors. Developing graphics with OpenGL lets you harness the increasing power of GPUs and really take your visuals to the next level. OpenGL Development Cookbook is your guide to graphical programming techniques to implement 3D mesh formats and skeletal animation to learn and understand OpenGL. OpenGL Development Cookbook introduces you to the modern OpenGL. Beginning with vertex-based deformations, common mesh formats, and skeletal animation with GPU skinning, and going on to demonstrate different shader stages in the graphics pipeline. OpenGL Development Cookbook focuses on providing you with practical examples on complex topics, such as variance shadow mapping, GPU-based paths, and ray tracing. By the end you will be familiar with the latest advanced GPU-based volume rendering techniques.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
OpenGL Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Implementing terrains using the height map


Several demos and applications require rendering of terrains. This recipe will show how to implement terrain generation in modern OpenGL. The height map is loaded using the SOIL image loading library which contains displacement information. A 2D grid is then generated depending on the required terrain resolution. Then, the displacement information contained in the height map is used to displace the 2D grid in the vertex shader. Usually, the obtained displacement value is scaled to increase or decrease the displacement scale as desired.

Getting started

For the terrain, first the 2D grid geometry is generated depending on the terrain resolution. The steps to generate such geometry were previously covered in the Doing a ripple mesh deformer using vertex shader recipe in Chapter 1, Introduction to Modern OpenGL. The code for this recipe is contained in the Chapter5/TerrainLoading directory.

How to do it…

Let us start our recipe by following these simple...