Since 2015 I have been working on a terrain engine project for Unity on which I spend most of my free time. It started as a subject we suggested for a six-months school project we had to do with two other friends, with me taking on its development after the school project ended. This project aims to create a real-time terrain engine capable of generating realistically scaled and detailed terrains on the fly, mimicking real-life sceneries, for interactive uses like simulators and video games. The featured screenshots show the terrain engine working on a 155 by 155km area of the Alps around the Mt Blanc, using a 1arc-second DEM heightmap (~30m precision). The video shows the results of a recent school project during which I've worked on adding volumetric clouds to this engine (and in general volumetric lighting and phenomena).
Current Features :
1:1 scale terrains using large heightmaps of Earth areas and procedural terrain detailing.
Fast terrain generation running on the GPU.
Centimeter-level terrain resolution and pixel-wide details in the distance.
A new method for rendering billboard vegetation using raycasting, not limited in complexity by distance or density.
Procedural material and vegetation placement mimicking natural processes and integration with SpeedTree objects.
Physics support.
(In development) Realistically scaled volumetric cloud coverage, athmosphere simulation and and weather system.
(In development) Terrain editing, roads, dirt paths, river beds.