Scenery can be very relaxing and inspiring (in fact, many photo albums are made up of such pictures); so it is only natural to want to model such images.

Specifications

Create a program that displays a smoothly shaded terrain over which the user can fly interactively. The terrain will be specified as a gray-scale image interpreted as a height field in which the darkness relates to the height (so the white areas would be the highest peaks and the darkest areas would be the lowest). So the basic shape could, for example, be drawn using any 2D paint program and saved as a bitmap file. If no image file is specified, the terrain should be generated automatically using a procedural fractal algorithm over an NxM grid.

Additionally, color the terrain based on its height and light the terrain based on computing the correct normals for each vertex of the height field. The light source for shading should be positioned well above one of the corners of the height field. Set the surface properties so that both diffuse and non-diffuse shading is visible. Use fog or other coloring techniques to make far away patches of the terrain less distinct.

The user of your program should be able to control a variety of options within your scene using the keyboard. You may choose which keys control which functions, but make sure they are clearly documented in your README file.

There are many parts of the homework that are open ended. You can earn bonus points with extremely creative and efficient solutions. Make sure that you mention your assumptions, extra features, and how to run your program in your README file.

To get you started, here are some extra credit ideas

Resources