   Creating terrain on a sphere
  Hi Guys, rather new to the forum but plan to be a frequent from here on out.So my question is I'm trying to add some terrain to a globe of a fake world I generated. I've generated my spheres, have uv coords for each vert but now I need to decide which technique to add the mountains etc. It's pretty realistic looking and I have a texture map already put on it, and a depth map prepared that represents my mountains and my dips in the surface of the sphere.So far I'm guessing Bump Mapping is the technique I'm looking for. But I figured I'd come to you guys to see what's what.Thanks a ton for your opinions, and looking forward to being around.   
  Oh and this is in OpenGL. It's a dedicated program and resources are not really a factor.   ;  I would go with a bump map. It should show good results. The few other ways I can think of is to displace the vertices but that requires a lot of polygons to get good results. I think you could put a parallax map on the sphere to though I'm not too sure how good that would look but it would at least look like you're displacing the vertices on the sphere though it has it's flaws too.   ;  Alright, thanks for the fast reply.  I had assumed as such but I've learned so many techniques for doing so many things, it's hard to ever imagine I actually know the right one.   ;Hello rcook,It depends on how closely the user needs to look at it. Bump mapping or parallax mapping will produce very poor results if the camera is up close; so if you are trying to make a game where you drive a car around on the surface, then it's not the right choice. In that case, you'd actually want to deform the geometry (which you could do quite efficiently with a vertex shader). However if you are just doing some kind of a view of the solar system, then bump mapping is perfect. Hope that helps, Sean;Quote:Original post by spurserhIn that case, you'd actually want to deform the geometry (which you could do quite efficiently with a vertex shader). Hope that helps, SeanThanks Sean, So I started a new post about the same topic, but a little more updated with where I'm at conceptually on this problem. You nailed it though, this is the same conclusion I'm coming to on the other thread. I guess I just didn't really think a vertex shader was for me because it doesn't seem to lend itself to fine details in displacement. I can use a pretty high face count sphere, but still It would seem stuff like ridges in mountains would come out poorly.I think I'm just going to go ahead and forge forward with this though and see where it takes me. Gotta come to a point where ya just start coding eventually :)   ;  To see some amazing terrain and LOD on a sphere, take a look at Ysaneya's development journal, you'll be amazed.   ;  Here we gohttp://www.opengl.org/wiki/Vertex_Texture_Fetch;  If you know your way around art programs, you can do a spherical unwrap onto a earth texture. In photoshop you can paint a seperate layer over the earth texture (white for high mountains, black for low stuff). You can then apply a displacement to your vertices and export the model.   