I’m looking to manipulate aspects of terrain, and some terms presented are foreign to me. Notably, “patches” are confusing me. I should know what a chunk is, however, it would help to be exactly sure of what it is.
I would also like to know the relation of “heightmap” in the code to aspects of the default terrain editor. I am unaware if the heightmap equates to the scale or equates to the vectors of the heightmap.
The technical implementation of the terrain splits the whole terrain into patches where each patch is made of 16 chunks laid down in a square (4x4). That’s the design under the hood which makes terrain rendering and loading very performant.
Each patch contains a heightmap texture and stores relative height, normal vector, and hole mask per vertex. It’s later used to generate a collision for PhysX heightfield and to render it on a screen.
The most of this magic happens here: