Geoplane creating support

[hendu]

https://sourceforge.net/p/irrlicht/patches/267/

This patch adds support for creating geoplanes, that is, meshes that give you automatic LOD in a GPU-friendly way.

You typically use one of these for either terrain or water, having it always be at the player's feet, and set the height/texture coord/normal in your vertex shader (from a heightmap, or wave simulation, etc.). Everything is static in the VRAM, no bus transfers like with the usual cpu-based terrain LOD.

[christianclavet]

Hi, Thanks Hendu! I've checked the code. For doing the LOD, How is it working? From what I understand, this will be done in the vertex shader, but how will it work with the mesh? Is there a way to use "tiles" with this? Or your model need to be made of a single mesh?

Googled a little to find out more about "geoplanes", from what I found is that the plane vertices are placed differently than a regular plane.


This help for LOD?

[hendu]

This is only for surfaces, you can't use it to LOD any arbitrary model. As mentioned, you'd usually use this for terrain or water.

This generates a planar surface mesh for you. You'd then move it to where your player is, and set the height correctly in your vertex shader. This allows you to avoid tiles, it's a much simpler method.

[christianclavet]

Ha! Ok! Nice trick! I've did not think about using this!