Merry Christmas Evereybody

Well its been a while ive been working hard on porting my engine to XNA4.0 and c#, also have rewritten the planet engine and finally got the atsmopheric scattering working properly , its looking ok, well got a few things i got to work out still. Terrain crack fixing and culling is not working properly yet and also maybe a little water will be nice. But what the heck its christmas, and i just wanted to offer my followers a little eye canddy. Here we go. My new engine now goes down to the ground level, on a planet the size of earth. Water at the moment is just the colour blue, really need to fix this. Well here is it enjoy.

A little edit i thought was necesary. and i have just realised i cant spell, can you see it in these pictures lol.

Little more progress

i have been working hard on this for a while now and i think i am getting someware i am although getting a bit stcuk with normal generation for dif lod levels, but im sure i will figure it out soon enough.
for now a few more screenys.

Just some updated screenshots

Just wanted to post some new screenshots, starting look like a real planet.

Anybody want some info on the techniques used just mail me and ill get back to you as soon as possible.

I added some clouds,water and a nice lense effect. Gotta work on the terrain now to lower the draw calls and up the fps, but not a bad job i think so far, i am quite happy with the results.

Finally worked the basics out

Well i been grafting hard on the planet and settled someware in the middle, its a gemipmap implementation, which is going to evolve in to a chunked lod, but that is later on got the atmospheric scattering working properly. I will post some implementation info soon, just need the time to do so but for now got some eye candy.

Its a lovely sunrise from the mountains, normals are not yet generated so shadows are not great but its getting there.

Got the atmospheric scattering working

Well finally managed to get the atmospheric scattering shader, geometry and the shader working properly and its looking pretty nice if i do say so myself. Now i gotta start to add some nicer effect. This may ateka while as this is not on my initial TODO list, as i have to fix the planet LOD first.

Update on what i have been working on

Ok well i have now decided i am going to stick with 6 square clipmaps and morph them in to a sphere, as spherical clipmaps is way beyind my math skills, and also alot more work maybe i will come back to it later on, so far i have managed to get the cube somewhat working and some multitexturing, but still alot of work needed. Its actually quite simple to get the planet its just making it look realistic is the hard part. I have also improved the atmospheric scattering shader a bit, but i cant seem to get the sphere to cull properly im currently working on that , and syncing the clipmap centers too. I have also vastly improved the framerate , by adding some adition optimization to the mesh code.

Been working Hard

I have been working hard on a new implementation using the paper writen by Malte Clasen and Hand-Christian Hege. Its going well so far, but loadz to go to be ohnest i just got the basic geometry working for now and i am working on the camera stuff then, i will be working on the heightmapping which i am currently dreding as its more dificult then actually creating the mesh lol. Anyways heres some screenshots of my current build.

This implmentation used clipmaps, as in hopes implementation, but using spherical rings instead of rectangles. The textureing system is similar to clipmaps, but needs to be converted over to spherical coords. I am aiming to do almost everything entirely on the GPU, as i think this is the way to go, and as you can see from the framerate so far its the best way to go.

Multi Texturing and Crators

I have been workin on multitexturing and cratos this wekend the detail is still too low for a full blown planet but its getting there. I will be posting some of the techniques used, when i have got them working to a satifactory point. But for now a little eye candy.

A bit of a muckup with the shaders but got a nice result lol.

Multitexturing fully implemented.

This has been done using the same procedure as last time. Calculate the distance from the center of the sphere, and use that as the height for each texture.

Latest screenshot

just a little screenshot from my latest code.

Going down a new path

I have decided to rewrite everything, now using quadtrees , well its actually based on oneal's sandbox example, i havent quite got the quadtree working 100% but i got some pretty neat effects, which i would like to show off. Here is a few  screenshots of my current progress.

Before terrain shading

 atmosphere from the ground

 a nice sunset

 atmosphere from space with terrain shading.

I havent quite got the hang of the split merge funtionality , but its working to an aceptable level for now.