Implementing terrains using the height map

Several demos and applications require rendering of terrains. This recipe will show how to implement terrain generation in modern OpenGL. The height map is loaded using the SOIL image loading library which contains displacement information. A 2D grid is then generated depending on the required terrain resolution. Then, the displacement information contained in the height map is used to displace the 2D grid in the vertex shader. Usually, the obtained displacement value is scaled to increase or decrease the displacement scale as desired.

Getting started

For the terrain, first the 2D grid geometry is generated depending on the terrain resolution. The steps to generate such geometry were previously covered in the Doing a ripple mesh deformer using vertex shader recipe in Chapter 1, Introduction to Modern OpenGL. The code for this recipe is contained in the Chapter5/TerrainLoading directory.

How to do it…

Let us start our recipe by following these simple...