My spherical planet LOD system creates jarring pops as players approach the surface. Traditional quad-tree transitions work on flat terrain, but curvature breaks my vertex blending. Any solutions from those who’ve shipped spherical games? Specifically need help with: 1) Geomorphing approaches that account for spherical distortion 2) Data structures for managing nested LOD regions across a sphere’s surface. Using Unity 2022 with custom shaders.
Spherical geometry requires dual LOD systems—one for surface detail, one for planetary curvature. Implement a two-pass tessellation shader that blends between icosphere subdivisions. Cache higher-LOD vertex positions in a compute buffer.
Dealt with this nightmare last year. The key was calculating LOD transitions based on arc length instead of Euclidean distance. Still needed to hack the Unity terrain component to accept spherical coordinates though.
Reference paper: ‘Continuous LOD for Spherical Terrain Rendering’ by Hwa et al. 2017. Implements a modified ROAM algorithm with curvature-aware error metrics. Source code available on GitHub.