So one of our main goals this semester is to do real-time terrain deformation, but what is terrain deformation?
A simple explanation of terrain deformation is moving the terrain up and down within our virtual environment. It is however, more complex than that. In most virtual environments and games, terrain is rendered using a technique called height maps.
A height map is a grayscale image where the white values of the image would be higher elevations of the terrain and the black values would be the lower elevations of the terrain. The computer would take that image and apply it to a flat plane. Then it would extrude or stretch the terrain from that flat plane based on the information in the height map image. Below is an image of a 2D height map image and the terrain that is generated from that height map.
* the height map is on the left the resulting terrain on the right. The bright white area on the height map is the plateau you see in the middle of the terrain.
As I said before deformation is moving terrain up and down within a virtual environment. The way we are doing this is changing the height map to reflect what the new terrain should look like. Essentially we are ‘painting’ the new terrain onto the height map and then updating the 3D model based on the changed height map.