We start the process of drawing a terrain by loading a model of a flat plane. It may be a simple quad with a little bit more than four vertices. Generating too many vertices in a tessellation stage may be too expensive performance-wise, so we need to find a balance between the complexity of a base geometry and the tessellation factors. We can see a plane used as a base for the tessellated terrain in the following image:
In this example, we will load height information from a texture. We do this in the same way as we load data from files. Then we create a combined image sampler and upload loaded data to its memory:
int width ...
