viewport-lib-terrain

An ItemTypePlugin providing heightmap and splatmap terrain rendering for viewport-lib.

Why not just a mesh?

You can put a triangulated landscape into viewport-lib as a regular mesh item. It will render. What you give up:

• Frustum culling at patch granularity. Off-screen patches skip the draw entirely.
• Memory. A 2049x2049 heightmap is roughly 8 MB ( with u16). The same surface as a triangle mesh with per-vertex normals and UVs is hundreds of MB before you've drawn the first frame.
• LOD. This crate splits the terrain into a quadtree of patches and picks a decimation level per patch per frame, with skirts to hide cracks between neighbouring patches. A static mesh draws every triangle every frame.
• Material. Eight surface layers (albedo, metallic, roughness) blended on the GPU through two splatmap textures with height-aware weighting. Doing this on a mesh means an eight-pass material, a custom shader, or baking it down and losing the layers.

If your terrain is small and single-textured, a mesh is fine. Past that, this crate is the cheaper path.

What you can attach

• A u16 heightmap, loaded directly from raw .r16 style blobs or built in memory.
• Two RGBA splatmap textures driving up to eight surface layers. Per-layer weight maps can be packed into the splatmap channels for you.
• Eight TerrainLayer slots, each carrying albedo, metallic, roughness, and a height bias for the height-aware blend.
• World-space origin, footprint, and height range so the same heightmap can be placed and scaled anywhere in the scene.
• Detail scatter (grass, trees, props) over the surface, with tree impostor LOD for distant instances.

Examples

cargo run --release --example eframe-terrain
cargo run --release --example eframe-terrain-lod
cargo run --release --example eframe-terrain-stress
cargo run --release --example eframe-plugin-jobs

See examples/ for the source of each demo, including the plugin registration, heightmap loading, splatmap packing, and detail scatter setup.