“A production tool for terrain generation”

Last year [Fairclough2004] and [Larsson2004] described the rendering architecture of a terrain tool at Digital Domain. During the production of Stealth, which included over 300 shots of fully CG terrain, it evolved greatly in terms of flexibility and workflow.
Stealth involved rendering huge areas of terrain, making explicit modeling very impractical. Instead, a procedural approach was needed. Procedural modeling, however, can be unintuitive and usually requires good knowledge of shader writing and geometry generation. The main challenge when developing this tool for the pro- duction of Stealth was how to supply non-technical artists with an interactive interface that enabled them to work in a very technical modeling and shading environment.
Two factors proved to be very important. First, providing a visual shader programming environment for the artists, allowing them to create complex shader networks. Secondly, offering several forms of previewing capabilities that could give the artists fast feedback and intuitive control over the shading process.

Fairclough, M., Wrenninge, M., Larsson, M. 2004. Robust rendering of high resolution terrain. In Conference Abstracts and Applications, SIGGRAPH 2004, ACM Press / ACM SIGGRAPH
Larsson, M., Wrenninge, M., Roble, D. 2004. Inter-frame caching for high quality terrain rendering. In Conference Abstracts and Applications, SIGGRAPH 2004, ACM Press / ACM SIGGRAPH