Step-by-step 3D terrain generation course!

''UPDATE 2/20/2006: After about a month, the project is now finished. You can go through the series and read my explanations for each step, or you can just page through and gander at the pretty pictures.
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I’m programming in C++ and using OpenGL for the rendering.
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A common approach is to keep the elevation data as a big greyscale image. This makes it easy to edit, and easy to “see” what the land looks like outside of the program. I’ll use a bitmap (windows BMP files are a good choice since they are easy to load, easy to create, and have lossless compression) where each pixel represents a single point on our grid. The brighter the pixel, the higher the point.
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