Lesson 7: Terrain

  • Smooth out the normals even more, by averaging in the diagonally adjacent normals in addition to the horizontally adjacent normal (for example, average in the normal that is one unit to the left and one unit out). Use a different weighting for these normals. Note that if we use too much smoothing, the lighting will look very smooth, but unrealistic. In the extreme case, all of our normals would be the same.
  • Make your own 60x60 heightmap, and view it in the program. Make it a little interesting (e.g. don't use a solid color). You might make it using an image editing program like The GIMP, Inkscape, or Paint; download a heightmap online and scale it to be 60x60; or find a program designed for making heightmaps.
  • Change the program to add together the heights of your heightmap and the heights of my heightmap and display the resulting terrain.

Next is "Lesson 8: Drawing Text".