Hi,

I would like to know the current capabilities of Away3D in terms of terrain generation.

I know of a couple ways to generate terrain:
- Using heightmaps, it’s fast but not flexible, and kind of boring and repetitive anyway.
- Using actual meshes, it’s very flexible but might be overkill, and possibly you cannot make large landscapes easily for performance reasons (or can you ?).

Recently I found a third way to generate terrain. It’s from the Phyre Engine and is described here (PDF back from 2008, the engine must have evolved since then).

I don’t know the official name of that technique, but based on what I read from the paper I’ll call it “High order surface terrain generation”.

Just read the overview part of the paper for a general idea in terms of terrain “features”. Every single point listed in the Goals subsection is exactly what I am looking for.

Can Away3D allow me to do that currently ?

If yes, could you hint me on how ?
If not, do you think I can reasonably hope to see it added within the next 3 months ? 6 ? 12 ? Unlikely any time soon ?

Thanks a bunch !

Hi, SuperSam

For the moment the best method and smooth is heightmaps.
http://3dflashlo.free.fr/planet/index.html
is a simple plane 254*254 faces with perlin noise bitmap.
code is not far than shallow water demo on away3d exemple

you have this interesting lod technics but need to translate for away3d
https://github.com/Glidias/alternterrain

for terrain like Phyre Engine you can use modeling application like 3dsmax, and create piece by piece terrain at low and high resolution, then swap the model according to the position.
Phyre Engine does not generate any automatic field is a program for modeling and export mesh.

awd & 3dsmax can do that to a reasonable size.

hope that help

Thanks, I’ll study the alternatives you propose. Maybe I can work around issue to get similar features as those of “high order surface terrain generation”, who knows

About Phyre stuff, Phyre level editor allows to modify terrain easily, and Phyre Engine’s terrain system is more flexible than heightmaps and less overkill than using meshes.

There is now a new API and accompanying terrain editing program for enhanced terrain called SandCastle which lets you create all sorts of realistic terrain types.  You can see more about it at http://www.theyellowthorn.com  .

The terrain supports 16-bt height maps so you get 65,536 variances in terrain heights as opposed to the 256 supported by Away3D’s elevation class.  The terrain also supports 7 levels of detail which can be changed by camera distance, sharing of materials, and infinite splatting layers. 

The SandCastle program also allows you to export your scene as the ActionScript setup code so you can inject the code directly into your project.  It essentially codes the entire scene for you.

If this is what you are looking for, I highly suggest you take a look.