Patching System

Hello,

I am currently interested in terrain systems for a project. What I am curerntly needing is a patching system that would patch together 512x512 blocks of heightmaps.

I have tried searching on google for tutorials and other information on this but none of the results I came across were particulary good.

Does anybody know of any decent (or any at all really) tutorials on this subject? Or does anyone have any ideas for this?? Any information (particulary tutorials) would by much appreciated.

Thanks for your time.

Take a huge height map and divide it into 512x512 segments. The conections along the divisions are your "patches"

The edges of your terrain blocks will be where you need to do some custom 'stitching' to get differing LOD's to weld together correctly.

Assuming you're using geomipmapping, since it's easy and you're talking about square blocks, you can just put in triangle fan skirts to do edge fixing.

hmm, you guys raise a good point.

Are you trying to implement a LOD system (geo-mipmapping) or a paging system?

Triangle fan skirts would work but may cause texture artifacts. I would like to try this method however.

Texture artifacts as well as crazy terrain features if your height map blocks don't line up remotely close. You could end up with a huge difference in height values at borders. This is why i suggest segmenting a larger height map into blocks instead of patching together arbitrary heightmaps.

Thanks for all your replies.

Perspective, I found the site in your signature to be particulary helpful.

To be honest I have no idea whether I'm doing a LOD system (geo-mipmapping) or a paging system. I'm thinking that seeing I already have a book on OpenGL that has a large section devoted to heighmapping and terrain rendering I may use that.

Anyway, once again many thanks for your help and advice.