Terrain and Object Generation

Terrain Generation

The first thing I needed was terrain for my objects to generate on. I created a perlin noise generator to generate a heightmap, then created a simple mesh with a vertex at each point along the heightmap. However, this resulted in fairly smooth terrain, which I wanted to be more extreme for testing, so I created a simple random-walk generator, which would also create a heightmap.

Poisson disc distribution

To distribute the objects evenly, I used a Poisson disc distribution. The program starts by creating an object at a random position, and adding it to its list of objects. It will then attempt to spawn a certain number of new objects around the original, and if it succeeds, those objects will be added to the list. This process repeats until the end of the list is reached.

For each spawn attempt, the program will choose a random position in a ring around the original object’s position, and see if that spot meets the object's spawn conditions (see Spawn Conditions). If it does, the program will check if the new object is colliding with any of the existing objects, and if no collisions are detected, the attempt will succeed.

This continues until there are no more objects in the list, at which point the list is returned.

One of these conditions was how much the object overlapped the ground, and where the overlap should start/ end. When spawning an object, the program would get the height range of the area it was spawning, and see if the object could be spawned at a position where the anything above the overlap max would be above ground, and anything below the overlap min would be below ground.

Initially, this could be checked fairly easily looking at the height map of the area. However, it became more complicated when I began implementing rotation