Hi, Some days ago i have posted and article "Mystirious Quads", and two people replied and i understood. So thinked, and thinked and thinked over i can build my heightmap better, but i didn''t find any good way. So tell please some things over good Terrains. eg: 1. Should I use Triangles or Quads ? 2. How should i build, when i use triangles, build together ? I hope you understand what i want to know

I did not read your original post, but here''s one piece of advice: use triangles. An important thing to remember when using quads: all four point must lie in a plane, otherwise it is possible to view it from such an angle that it will be concave (non-convex...) and therefor render incorrectly. With only quads, it is not possible to build any arbitrary heightmap (there are a lot of limits...). I''d say it''s best to use triangle_strips like I do in my code. It works...

HTH,
Thamas

Terrain engines always draw triangles, but they usually use quadtree nodes instead of triangle nodes.

I first coded mine using triangle nodes -- i.e. the entire level is represented by two triangles, which are recursively subdivided to get to a desired detail level -- but that was extremely slow. I changed it to use square nodes -- one node representing the entire level, recursively subdivided into four nodes until it reaches the desired detail level. This is much faster, and quadtrees are what are usually used in landscapes. Plus there''s some optimizations that can be done with them that can''t be done with triangles.

~CGameProgrammer( );