International Journal Of Virtual Reality article

The latest issue of the open access, online journal International Journal Of Virtual Reality (IJVR) has published an article I co-authored with colleagues at Bournemouth University, titled Automating Terrain Texturing in Real-Time Using a Rule-Based Approach.

This publication proposes a novel approach to automatically colour and texture a given terrain mesh in real time. Through the use of weighting rules, a simple syntax allows for the generation of texture and colour values based on the elevation and angle of a given vertex. It is through this combination of elevation and angle that complex features such as ridges, hills and mountains can be described, with the mesh coloured and textured accordingly. The implementation of the approach is done entirely on the GPU using 2D lookup textures, delivering a great performance increase over typical approaches that pass colour and weighting information in the fragment shader. In fact, the rule set is abstracted enough to be used in conjunction with any colouring/texturing approach that uses weighting values to dictate which surfaces are depicted on the mesh.

You can check the article out here, published on Vol 9, Issue 4 (pp. 21-28) of the journal.