June | 2012 | Andrew Gotow

I was disappointed when I found out that the Unity terrain engine did not work properly on mobile devices, so I experimented with a number of different custom solutions. Over time, this project began to evolve into a fractal terrain generator, using simple noise algorithms to produce a randomly generated landscape. Next, I wrote custom shaders to blend between a stony texture and a grassy texture depending on the slope of the terrain. This worked well, but lacked the depth I felt it needed. The final step was implementing the custom shell model used to represent grass. The terrain is rendered multiple times with various vertex offsets in a multi-pass shader, with time and location based fluctuations to emulate wind, and a grass height based on slope, and some user specified parameters.

The system works fairly well, and allows for a simple procedural terrain that can be dropped into any scene.

: A simple landscape generated by the script.

: A close-up of the rendered grass, implemented in the base terrain shader.

: A view of the generated terrain from within the Unity engine.

You can experiment with this script by running the Unity Player here

In 2009 I began experimenting with OpenGL. I found it cumbersome and unwieldy, but incredibly versatile and powerful as a rendering engine. As a result, I wrote a simple wrapper library in order to streamline the OpenGL programming process, creating a series of wrapper classes and internal formats to dramatically simplify project workflow and make the entire OpenGL rendering framework much easier to use.

This unnamed library supports a number of distinct features, such as near instantaneous mesh file loading, custom texture import functions for a number of formats, support for GLSL shaders, per-pixel lighting with a large number of dynamic lights, and multi-buffered post-processing effects.