Concentric LOD Areas

Not really any new functionality, however small but important modifications. In the previous posts and video of the planet each patch was independent and updated when it thought correct regardless of the state of its neighbours. This resulted in a non-uniform patch pattern and multiple terrain cracks. A more detailed explanation of terrain cracks can be seen here.

Instead of a patchwork quilt on the planet surface, the terrain LOD (Level of Detail) decreases in concentric circles with its origin at the camera. All patches which neighbour a patch with lower LOD render the corner edge downgraded to the lower LOD preventing any terrain cracks appearing.

In the above pictures the radius of the LOD circle is set to 6.0. This means that the LOD circle has a radius of the length of the patch at this level of detail multiplied by 6.0. This value can be changed at runtime if desired resulting in a higher or lower detail of terrain.

Another change in the example, although not obvious from the pictures is that the planet is no longer updated/rendered from the root node. Now, during the first frame the lead patch is found. This is the patch that is directly below the camera at the correct LOD. Each frame when the planet updates the lead patch moves to one of its neighbours, children or its parent if required. This requires a little more code than simply recursively moving across the patch tree each frame, but should be faster as it removes the processing on many invisible patches (those which are closer to the root of the patch tree but are too low level of detail to meet our needs).