Hello World
Introduction to Hello Terrain
Pardon our dust
Work in progress, sorry about that.
Overview
Hello Terrain is a library for rendering large open world terrains in real time, using browser technologies.
It the core, it's an extensible work graph that executes and outputs data and shaders to render one or more Threejs Instanced Mesh, in the shape of your terrain. The work graph can be amended via custom nodes or plugins to tweak the behavior for your game or world's use-case.
Each core component, such as the normals calculation stage, just to pick an example, can be swapped out and easily replaced with your own implementation.
Preparing Terrain Data
Displaying terrains for your virtual world requires two things.
- An instruction of what the terrain should be (the terrain data), and
- a performant way to render that terrain data into your screen.
Your terrain data can come from real-life sources (like elevation data from satellites), or from special software used to generate heightmaps (like Gaea 2). You can also produce that data at run-time, procedurally. Or, my personal favorite, use a mixture of these techniques. More examples of the techniques are to come in it's own article.