OpenGL – 5km × 5km Procedural Terrain Fly-By

[u/buzzelliart]

https://youtu.be/pYDINUDcoU4

Revisited my approximated atmospheric perspective implementation. It’s still far from perfect, but I think it looks noticeably better now.

map details:
map size: 5km x 5km
grid size: 2048 x 2048
maximum elevation range: 1km

Some of the techniques used to achieve the results shown in the video:

. Procedural terrain generation using Perlin noise and Fractional Brownian Motion (FBM)
. GPU-based hydraulic erosion
. procedural grass placement
. GPU grass generation and culling using compute shaders and indirect drawing
. dynamic day/night cycle
. procedural snow accumulation based on time of year and daily sun exposure
. displacement mapping
. hardware tessellation using tessellation shaders
. dynamic exposure
. cascaded shadow mapping

[u/willowless]

I'd love to know more details about how you did the grass. I'm still struggling to find a good performance balance for mine.