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You're reading from  Grome Terrain Modeling with Ogre3D, UDK, and Unity3D

Product typeBook
Published inFeb 2013
Reading LevelIntermediate
Publisher
ISBN-139781849699396
Edition1st Edition
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Author (1)
Richard A. Hawley
Richard A. Hawley
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Richard A. Hawley

Richard Hawley started programming in the early 1980s at the start of the home computer craze with the Sinclair ZX-81. Before leaving high school he had worked on three game projects for Assassin Software and later worked on conversions of classic strategy board games for 8- to 16-bit machines. He went on to develop end-user tools for popular flight simulations including Empire Interactives Enemy Engaged helicopter series and the highly successful Origin Janes Longbow series (MissioneerPlus). Hes the director of Tricubic Studios, a small UK company dedicated to creating simulation and training environments using off-the-shelf 3D engines including Unity and Leadwerks. Together with technical artist David Hopkinson (Total War: English Civil War conversion) and physics guru Fred Naar (creator of Helicopter Total Realism for Microsoft Flight Simulator X) they are collectively known for their work on helicopter simulations.
Read more about Richard A. Hawley

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Water layers


A water layer contains information about a water surface such as height level, texture, tiling, reflection, speed of waves, and so on.

Water is a simple plane object that fits the assigned zone, positioned at a height specified in the "level" parameter. By changing the "level" we can move the water plane up and down, intersecting the terrain.

Note

A plane is a 2D surface. The simplest is a quad made up of two triangles.

Sometimes in 3D engines that use water planes, ugly z-fighting artifacts are visible in areas where the ground geometry intersects the water plane, usually in the middle. This effect is more visible the higher the viewer is relative to the plane.

Terrain geometry close to the water plane is near coplanar (lying in the same plane), as a result of mathematical inaccuracies this can cause parts of the z-buffer to "fight" for dominance.

Note

The z-buffer is an offscreen area which stores the depth of each generated onscreen pixel. Almost every 3D system uses one.

Z-fighting...

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Grome Terrain Modeling with Ogre3D, UDK, and Unity3D
Published in: Feb 2013Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781849699396

Author (1)

author image
Richard A. Hawley

Richard Hawley started programming in the early 1980s at the start of the home computer craze with the Sinclair ZX-81. Before leaving high school he had worked on three game projects for Assassin Software and later worked on conversions of classic strategy board games for 8- to 16-bit machines. He went on to develop end-user tools for popular flight simulations including Empire Interactives Enemy Engaged helicopter series and the highly successful Origin Janes Longbow series (MissioneerPlus). Hes the director of Tricubic Studios, a small UK company dedicated to creating simulation and training environments using off-the-shelf 3D engines including Unity and Leadwerks. Together with technical artist David Hopkinson (Total War: English Civil War conversion) and physics guru Fred Naar (creator of Helicopter Total Realism for Microsoft Flight Simulator X) they are collectively known for their work on helicopter simulations.
Read more about Richard A. Hawley