Accompanying the launch of the Visual Computing microsite, Intel Software and Solutions Group software engineer Jeff Freeman has put together an article demonstrating several techniques (including the source code) for creating realistic terrain scenes on systems with integrated graphics solutions.

For the demonstration, Freeman mixed terrain patch generating techniques proposed by Dr. F Kenton Musgrave with texture blending and Shader Model 3.0 to create a synthetic scene on integrated graphics solutions: "Our implementation was inspired by Musgrave's work in Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach, showcasing three methods from that text: simple fBm, hybrid fBm, and the ridged multifractal algorithm, each based on Perlin's noise algorithm. The output from these methods is used to perturb the Z direction of a fixed size polygon mesh."

Freeman notes that a number of interesting fractal terrain generation problems still need to be tackled: "Applications of automatic landscape generation face decisions associated with conflicting game-play elements in the storyline or unrealistic features that present themselves from both fBm and other fractional models of terrain."

He continues: "In addition, most terrain generation methods are calculation intensive and are not real-time. While some fractal algorithms lend themselves easily to multi-threading, the result is still time consuming as is the case with the Mandelbrot set and may not apply well without significantly reducing the size of the perturbed surface greatly or reducing the number of iterations inspected."