In another thread, I was asking for some off-the-shelf way to subdivide a sphere so that you can go all the way from orbit (or farther) down to the ground, gaining more and more detail in the area you can see.
Apparently, there isn’t such a solution readily available. So, it looks like I’m going to have to make one.
It then occurred to me that this would also be good for planes. So the idea is something like this:
Add a plane (with this script attached) to your scene, and give it a height function that returns the ground height (Y) for any XZ position it asks for. Set a few parameters to control how quickly you want the mesh to subdivide, what the maximum subdivision is, etc., and then just run. It automatically takes care of subdividing the mesh for you, making sure sub-patches join seamlessly with their neighbors, recombining subdivided patches when they get too far from the camera, etc.
The net result would be that you could fly high over the plane, and have a reasonable number of polygons on screen providing a reasonable level of detail; and then swoop down, all the way to the ground if you want, and still have good detail, because the mesh would be subdivided in the region near the camera, while still using fewer polygons farther away from the camera.
In addition to the plane, I’d also provide the same thing for a sphere. This would be great for planets and other planet-like objects, where they may be a pale blue dot in the distance, or you may zoom all the way in to landing on them, with lumpy terrain where it matters.
So:
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Is there already something widely available that does this?
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Would you be interested in such an asset, at a reasonable price?
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Are there any base geometries you would want, besides plane and sphere?
Thanks,
- Joe