todd

Fun With Heightmaps (Special Glasses Required)

Yeah, just messing around. Found some great heightmap source code at gametutorials.com, and, combining this with the good stuff at NeHe and some stuff on anaglyphic opengl rendering I've been seeing what I can come up with. Most of these I've linked to in the past, but it's good to get them all in one place from time to time. The anaglyph stuff took a bit of work to get right, and I also owe a lot to footnotes on the subject I found throughout the net, as well as immense help on the subject from Perry. If you have any red/cyan 3D glasses, bust 'em out (I've been using red-eye-left):

And a render from above:

I added a semi-transparent "water" layer, as well as giving both the mountains and water a spotty, noisy (and ultimately rather abstract) texture in an effort to help the steregraphic effect.

It's a flythrough, using the same controls I had for the Static City (aka Grand Cell Auto). Still pushing to see how detailed I can get things. I will have to deal with terrain modeling sooner rather than later for my thesis, but I'm really just having fun with this right now, seeing where it goes...

A lot of this was inspired by the awesome, awesome pictures taken by the Mars Express (check the images section)...they're taking stereographic (as well as conventional) photos of the Martian surface down to a resolution of about 15-20m/pixel. They are very probably the most amazing anaglyphic photos I've ever seen. Looking the Louros Valles or Olympus Mons from above, with unearthly detail, is really impressive.