Recently I've been stuck on a problem thinking about the best way to generate a terrain into my game. In another projects I normally used heightmaps, so all the core-work was based on the engine used, but now this cannot be done because the terrain has millions of specific polygons that must be drawn accurately. Also, many of them cannot be parsed from the Y vector (because of polygons hidden beneath), that is, a heightmap is not useful here. In this case I had to use a COLLADA object.
Someone told me to manually divide the model inside a software like Blender, but unfortunately this is also not possible because these terrains are created in chunks in another software and loaded after into the game (that's the idea). Therefore this would be a big work to be obliged to manually slice them everytime.
Thus, since a week I've been studying about how could I solve this problem and procedurally load this mesh, the terrain, accordingly to the camera frustrum, saving as much performance as possible. I came accross many documents about procedural mesh generation and I think that my problem could be solved by mapping the mesh into octrees. This is BIG work, at least for me, and that's why I'm here, because I don't want to risk taking the wrong path without before hearing from experienced people.
In short, I have millions of vertices and indices that together form the terrain, but for obvious reasons I cannot draw them at the same time. It's needed some kind of procedure. What's the best way to do that, to treat a big mesh as a terrain? Is there any specific book about that? Is there a best way to implement it?
Sorry for any kind of mistake, I'm very novice on this area.