DayOfWar SixSidedSpheres 2nd try

OK I got bored and a little mad so I decided to try the post again.

My approach is similar to the way Spore appears to do planets.

You take six heightfields and create a cube with them.

This is a unfolded cube. Each square is a heightfield.


Where 1 is the north pole and 6 is the south pole.
And 2 3 4 and 5 are regoins around the equator.
As should be apparent you have to wrap the terrains in a very special way or you will have visible seams.
Square 1's left side needs to wrap with square 2's top and 1's right side needs to wrap with 5's top and so on.

Now doing something like taking each heightfield and applying a spherical distortion will give you a bulged square that will give you a sphere with large gaps.


What is needed is to take the heightfield and project them from a center point.

The next set of images show how this specially projected atlas terrain is not square.





This is a picture of the planet with all six atlas terrains configured like a cube.


This shows the same planet with the top terrain moved up a little to show how they fit together.


After 7 complete rewrites of my planet code here is what I have.
I have 3 different ways to achieve the spherical cubes from above.

The first is a custom importer that is used to create a atlas file with the correct projection.
This one is 100% done and has the benefit of creating atlas files that can be loaded by any version of TGEA with no code modification

The second is a runtime converter that takes a standard atlas file and applies the projection at load time.
This one is 95% done. I am still having some issues with re projecting the bounds for each chunk due to the way the atlas file stores them in the file.

And the best for last.
A atlas derived class that takes all six heightfields and creates a single Spherical Cube based CLOD terrain system. It has all the advantages of clipmapping, paged terrain, blended terrain and is able to load/create lightmaps in game.
This one is about 65% done.

If you would like to test the first example you can download the file from here.