I've been fiddling with ideas about how to handle terrain elevation and such on spherical planets. So far my only idea has been to dot the planet's surface with joints, and while I think that would be fine for small planets without much detail, I'm not so sure about bigger, more detailed ones (they'd have tons of joints, and I'd like to avoid splitting the planets into multiple pieces if at all possible). Is there a better way to handle it?
Personally I think the optimal solution is a geo mipmap based terrain approach in combination with oct tree for the actual subdivision storage and LoD level decision. This can either be done through the modeller or through a script that generates the data basing on a heightmap
dreamora, could you point me to some articles to read about something concerning "geo mipmap based terrain approach in combination with oct tree for the actual subdivision storage and LoD level decision"?