Hello, I am looking for a simple terrain tutorial. It has to be simple because I dont want to be hit with alot of advanced techniques in one go. A simple terrain engine would be nice, with no really advanced and confusing things. Prefferable GLUT. I dont really care too much about what kind of terrain engine, height map or whatever, just any type that is not too crappy like specifying all the vetecies yourself 
I am making a terrain tutorial that is VERY VERY basic for the complete dummy. This should be very easy for most begginers to follow. I started writing it because I was in a similar position to you all I could find were advanced tutorials using ROAM with octrees and CVAs or VAR with multi texturing and so on. My tut is very simple, to simple infact but I hope this means that no one ever has any difficulties with it. It is set at a level for someone who has little knowledge on OpenGL (just started using textures) and has fairly poor programming. It also uses the NeHE base code to do the windows interface stuff etc.
There is only one slight problem, I have only written the first tutorial and I am too busy to write the next tutorial. The first tutorial only covers up to rendering a flat terrian with texturing. The next one covers making some hills etc and moveing around it, I have started on some source code for the 2nd tutorial so maybe this weekend I will write it for you.
I will email you the web adress because the site is very basic, under construction and has nothing there apart from this one tutorial so I don’t want it to be advertised yet.
Looks like it is exactly what im looking for, but one problem, I use glut and i have no idea about the win32 API, this is because i want all my programs to be platform independent, me being a win/linux user with a dual boot system… No matter I suppose, I think that unless you use a ton of Win32 I should be able to convert it into GLUT, but if it was originally glut would be much better.
MrShoe,
You’re in luck! For a very small fee, you can get both a terrain tutorial, and all your questions answered. I’m the professor for a course called “Real-Time 3D Terrain Rendering” at the Game Institute. http://www.gameinstitute.com
You might also be interested in a few articles from Gamasutra: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000403/turner_01.htm
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000228/ulrich_01.htm
You should be able to find what you need from one of those sources. Also, do a search of these forums with the keywords “terrain rendering” and you’ll find a wealth of other information.
–BryanNC
Antonio Ramirez Fernandez has a good (long and easy) tutorial on terrain rendering (also with texture heightmap generation).
Can’t remember the url, find it on tutorials list on www.spinningkids.org/umine
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Thanks all, now all that is left for me is to learn terrain rendering…
I have made some terrain demo program.
You can find some nice demos in my homepage.
hjhhk.mytripod.co.kr
If you have VistaPro that will generate some random fractal terrains for you, it can then save the as an ascii heightmap.
If you load this heightmap you can then render it using triangle strips, simply scan along every row.