Terrain lighting?

I have a pretty good terrain renderer so far, but im wondering about lighting…

how would i do a sun-like light… like a huge spotlight thing… how do you guys do it???

thanks!

Well using OpenGL lighting can be not fast enough to get a satisfying results. I don’t know what you are planning. OpenGL can give quite realistic effect but in the case of the whole terrain it can be not too good solution. You would have to support every triangle with normal vectors, do some additional calculations etc…

Another solution is to use some predefined color maps. You set the textures to be drawn blended with vertices colors and then, depending on the time of day, you change colors on the map. And what about the sun and the sky? It’s all about the graphics you use…

That’s my opinion. I suggest you should think about this second solution since I are doing some kind of real-time rendering probably.

Orzech