A turnkey Qt Widget to display a terrain in 3D. Tessellation is used to efficiently display the terrain, so that it runs in real time even on low-end hardware. A very efficient algorithm to approximate global illumination has been implemented based on this paper: Timonen, Ville, and Jan Westerholm. "Scalable Height Field Self‐Shadowing." Computer Graphics Forum. Vol. 29. No. 2. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010. Tested only with Nvidia and Intel GPUs. It probably works on AMD GPUs as well.
The widget does not come pre compiled in a library. You have to include files in your project and use them as explained in section "Using the Widget in your application".
If you want to test the software, the widget is wrapped in a sample application. You can either compile it or download a binary version from GitHub. To use it:
- Click on File > Load
- Select a heightmap file (8 bits or 16 bits grayscale image)
- Use the trackball camera to rotate the terrain (click and drag)
- Qt 6.2 LTS
- OpenCV 4.5.5
using namespace TerrainViewer;
// Create the widget
TerrainViewerWidget* terrainViewer = new TerrainViewerWidget();
// Load the heightmap image
const auto image = cv::imread("terrain.png", cv::ImreadModes::IMREAD_ANYDEPTH);
// Create a terrain from the heightmap
const float width = 10.f;
const float height = 10.f;
const float maxAltitude = 1.f;
Terrain terrain(width, height, maxAltitude);
terrain.loadFromImage(image);
// Display the terrain
terrainViewer->loadTerrain(terrain);Mathieu Gaillard
This software has been developed for the CGT-520 and CGT-521 classes at Purdue University.
See the LICENSE file.