Heightfield size vs Light Map aliasing

[dpadam450]

Your basic tutorial says to use a 256x256 HF to make basic FPS stuff.

It seemed the lighting map was very aliasing using 256x256 to render into the 2048x2048 light map. (I resized the HF afterwards so I could get a higher resolution Light Map / Texture Map).

It seems that resizing the map didn't fix the problems of aliasing. Maybe the HF didnt interpolate on resize? I'm not really sure. I was working with a 2048x2048 HF at first but it seemed like it produced too much noise because of how much perlin noise I used. (You cant tell how bumpy the terrain is because its width/height in verts is not 2048x2048 (or so it seems its not).

Maybe I should just blur the HF in photoshop to reduce the noise afterwards? I'm not sure if this is a normal problem or maybe I should have just used the "noisy normal map" and finished everything to see the final result on a terrain.

[Aaron]

Hi Dpadam450,

Are you using the Standard or Professional version of L3DT? The Pro version includes anti-aliasing for the light map.

Also, did you generate a high-resolution normal map? (again, only available in the Pro version.)

Regards,
Aaron.

[dpadam450]

Standard,

I zoomed in and it looks like it did output some pixel-pixel parts, but for some reason there are like 4x4 chunks at certain points. The pixel-pixel parts seem to be the outline of my mountain on flat terrain, the bigger chunks are up at the mountain where there will be varying HF values. I'm thinking maybe it was just because I down-sampled my HF and then up-sampled it.

Is there a way to set the amount of texture tiling for splat textures?

[dpadam450]

Made another mountain real quick, seems like the downsampling is probably what did it.

[Aaron]

Hi dpadam450,

I'm thinking maybe it was just because I down-sampled my HF and then up-sampled it.

Correct. Down-sampling discards a lot of information that you don't get back by up-sampling.

Is there a way to set the amount of texture tiling for splat textures?

Yes, within reason. The texture blending algorithm is optimised to blend together an arbitrarily large number of materials, each with an arbitrarily large number of textures, all of which may be stretched using different scale factors. However, the scaling factor for each splat texture must be an integral ratio that represents either the size of a splat texture pixel relative to a heightfield pixel, or that of a splat texture pixel relative to the output texture pixel. These settings may be edited using the texture layer editor window, and the meaning of the scaling factors is (somewhat) explained in the resolution settings section of the user guide. Please let me know if you have any questions not answered by the documentation.

Regards,
Aaron.