Hi!
While looking through TerrainPage and TerrainBlock info I realized that they are good for flat terrains. Is it possible to use them for making planets (shperes, maybe using cube to sphere transormations)?
Have anybody used them for making spherical landscapes?
anyone? :?
There’s a bit of discussion on it in the Mapspinner thread.
I think trying to curve the TerrainBlock or Page itself would be a square peg in a round hole :D.
TerrainBlocks are good for modelling variations in height of terrain you are fairly close to. As such you wouldn’t generally perceive the curvature of the planet. If you were distant enough to see a large chunk of the planet, you might use bump mapping or something similar, but modelling all the terrain would not make sense (most details far smaller than a pixel).
When you’re close up, all of a TerrainPage is stored in memory at once, so you wouldn’t have the whole planet in a single page. You would need to stream it. You could perhaps do something there to account for the curve as you build the visible range terrain, which could remain square.
I agree, perhaps use the terrain page as you navigate the planet since we perceive it as flat…
if you want to be able to have spheres in space, perhaps just find a texture, and texture the sphere to look like a planet(do you really need heights etc… for that "far")? when the person is on the planet switch to terrain pages etc…
imo, people can't view it both ways, but if you wanna have fun…
Thanks for the answers!
I found it difficult to switch seamlessly from sphere to TerrainPage, so I make a class that makes N by N sided mesh, that cosists of quads, and then spherify it, and so on.
The FPS increase was more than 100x times 
There you go, sounds difficult, I guess your taking off in a shuttle or some other arial view… sounds neat.