How to determine character's foot contact point on a uniform triangle mesh terrain?

Posted by xenon on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by xenon
Published on 2013-04-28T19:54:06Z Indexed on 2013/10/21 16:12 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 366

Filed under:

terrain

|

heightmap

For a terrain that is modelled by a heightmap with a uniform triangle mesh, what are some techniques I could use to determine the contact point of the foot of a character standing on the terrain?

Since the terrain's Y values are altered by the heightmap, they won't be flat any more. As the character moves on the terrain, it has to know at which values of Y-value its foot should be. Conceptually, what are some methods and techniques to determine the contact point of the character's foot standing on the terrain?

© Game Development or respective owner

Related posts about terrain

Endless terrain in jMonkey using TerrainGrid fails to render

as seen on Game Development - Search for 'Game Development'
I have started to learn game development using jMonkey engine. I am able to create single tile of terrain using TerrainQuad but as the next step I'm stuck at making it infinite. I have gone through the wiki and want to use the TerrainGrid class but my code does not seem to work. I have looked around… >>> More
Voxel terrain rendering with marching cubes

as seen on Game Development - Search for 'Game Development'
I was working on making procedurally generated terrain using normal cubish voxels (like minecraft) But then I read about marching cubes and decided to convert to using those. I managed to create a working marching cubes class and cycle through the densities and everything in it seemed to be working… >>> More
How to render a terrain using height maps and getting basic collision detection on top of the terrain and camera (moving on the terrain)

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
I have loaded a .RAW file into a 2x2 array in my class. The way I am rendering it works fine but I am struggling to get the camera to move on top of the terrain. The terrain renders from 0,0,0 (x,y,z) as that is where I put my camera. My camera class allows to the "camera" to move through the scene… >>> More
Design pattern for procedural terrain assets

as seen on Game Development - Search for 'Game Development'
I'm developing a procedural terrain class at the moment and am stuck on the correct design pattern. The terrain is 2D and is constructed from a series of (x,y) points. I currently have a method that just randomly adds points to an array of points to generate a random spread of points. However I need… >>> More
Unity: how to apply programmatical changes to the Terrain SplatPrototype?

as seen on Game Development - Search for 'Game Development'
I have a script to which I add a Terrain object (I drag and drop the terrain in the public Terrain field). The Terrain is already setup in Unity to have 2 PaintTextures: 1 is a Square (set up with a tile size so that it forms a checkered pattern) and the 2nd one is a grass image: Also the Target… >>> More

Related posts about heightmap

Heightmap generation

as seen on Game Development - Search for 'Game Development'
I want to implement something like this to create a heightmap: 'Place a group of coordinates evenly across a map, and give them height values within a certain range. Repeatedly create coordinates between all of those coordinates, setting their height by deriving a value that was a mean value of all… >>> More
Arrays for a heightmap tile-based map

as seen on Game Development - Search for 'Game Development'
I'm making a game that uses a map which have tiles, corners and borders. Here's a graphical representation: I've managed to store tiles and corners in memory but I'm having troubles to get borders structured. For the tiles, I have a [Map Width * Map Height] sized array. For corners I have [(Map… >>> More
XNA Seeing through heightmap problem

as seen on Game Development - Search for 'Game Development'
I've recently started learning how to program in 3D with XNA and I've been trying to implement a Terrain3D class(a very simple height map). I've managed to draw a simple terrain, but I'm getting a weird bug where I can see through the terrain. This bug happens when I'm looking through a hill from… >>> More
Heightmap in Shader not working

as seen on Game Development - Search for 'Game Development'
I'm trying to implement GPU based geometry clipmapping and have problems to apply a simple heightmap to my terrain. For the heightmap I use a simple texture with the surface format "single". I've taken the texture from here. To apply it to my terrain, I use the following shader code: texture Heightmap; sampler2D… >>> More
Sending changes to a terrain heightmap over UDP

as seen on Game Development - Search for 'Game Development'
This is a more conceptual, thinking-out-loud question than a technical one. I have a 3D heightmapped terrain as part of a multiplayer RTS that I would like to terraform over a network. The terraforming will be done by units within the gameworld; the player will paint a "target heightmap" that they'd… >>> More