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Whats lacking from Terragen?

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Postby demi » Sun Dec 18, 2005 12:56 pm

aaron wrote:Hi All,

As promised I've done some work on improving the high-res texture output. Whereas the old algorithm interpolated land-types for high-res textures, the new one calculates them procedurally per-texture-pixel, and this makes it a lot sharper. The first screenshot is in the gallery at:

http://www.bundysoft.com/coppermine/displayimage.php?album=7&pos=3

This image was a 16x texture, and you can see that the grass/rock interface is very sharp indeed (possibly too sharp). There are still a few more tricks to be added, including a weensie-bit of bump-mapping and some (more) perlinnoise into the land-type calculation.

This was a real hack 'n' slash job, so it's going to take some time to clean-up the code. The update will probably be next year.

Cheerio,
Aaron.


This is great news. I have stayed up all night trying to make the texture splattering work. I just can't find enough information to do it. Maybe you can point me in the right direction.

I have a basic x1 map, 3 alpha channels and the tiles just don't understand how to implement it.

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Postby dEaThMaStEr » Sun Dec 18, 2005 1:25 pm

Damn, got work goin already with this? Must say man, you work pretty quick. Heh. And I'm really likin this, getting things ready to really show what L3DT can do and get people to totally give up on TG for their terrain generation! :D
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Postby dEaThMaStEr » Sun Dec 18, 2005 1:29 pm

By the way, you mentioned bump mapping. I'm assuming you mean for the textures? With that I was thinking, what if you had the user define a specific bumpmap in the climate file that L3DT would then apply to the texture, adding in more lighting detail? So then you make a bumpmap for the cracked stone for example and put in a normal map and now all the cracks and crevaces look fully defined on the texture in terms of lighting.
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Postby Aaron » Sun Dec 18, 2005 2:45 pm

Hello again,

The coding-frenzy is over; I think I've finished the texture-generation upgrade. Here are some quick results with a map I had at-hand:

Image
Image
Image
(3rd image is a telephoto shot of area in 2nd image, using L3DTVi2's zoom feature)

This was a fairly standard 4x texture, but the new algorithm will go up to 32x. It is, however, significantly slower (probably 5x, but I've yet to time it out). In L3DT 2.3c Professional you will be able to choose between the two, whereas in L3DT standard you will only get the old algo.

demi wrote:I have stayed up all night trying to make the texture splattering work. I just can't find enough information to do it. Maybe you can point me in the right direction.


I normally recommend Nate Glasser's article:

http://www.gamedev.net/columns/hardcore/splatting/

I'm sorry I can't be of more help; I've never implemented splatting in a 3D renderer.

dEaThMaStEr wrote:Damn, got work goin already with this? Must say man, you work pretty quick.


It was a quiet Sunday afternoon, and the algorithm wasn't actually that hard to program (mostly lashing bits of my other algorithms together).

dEaThMaStEr wrote:By the way, you mentioned bump mapping. I'm assuming you mean for the textures?


Yeah, that was the plan. I ended up cheating and just applied perlinnoise to the weightings of the land types (this looked better anyhow).

dEaThMaStEr wrote:With that I was thinking, what if you had the user define a specific bumpmap in the climate file that L3DT would then apply to the texture, adding in more lighting detail? So then you make a bumpmap for the cracked stone for example and put in a normal map and now all the cracks and crevaces look fully defined on the texture in terms of lighting.


I like it! I'll pencil it into the dev plan.

Cheers,
Aaron.

(sleep time now)
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Postby dEaThMaStEr » Sun Dec 18, 2005 3:32 pm

Heh, things are starting to look quite interesting. Kind of strange though how a step back like this in looks, how you get such sharp edges that is, can in the end make quite a step forward.

I'm not really too worried about render times either. If I want to do a quick test I could just switch to the old algorithm and then jump to the new one for a more final render. Kinda like where this is going. :D

Now, let me just sort of recap here so I get an idea of whats all going on. So with this new method your going on, the land types will be calculated for each pixel on the texture? So with that, will that mean much sharper and subtle changes all over? Just makin sure I got everything of where this is goin. ;)
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Postby JavaJones » Sun Dec 18, 2005 8:15 pm

Sorry for recommending WM over L3DT Aaron :D but I just haven't seen the simplicity and ease of use in masking from L3DT that I have from WM. You can easily do your own custom height and slope-based masks without having to edit a climate file. The multiple erosion outputs are also quite useful and I'm not sure if L3DT has those matched (I've never seen fluvial-type masks from L3DT used to mask texture in a TG render for example). Admittedly my practical L3DT experience on that level is limited at this point, so I may just be ignorant of the possibilities. But I do know it's super easy in WM. ;)

If your engine supports bump mapping natively then baking a bump map into your texture from a static light angle would kind of suck. But I guess if the engine doesn't do bump mapping it's the best way to get additional detail in the terrain. It just won't be light angle dependent, which is only an issue if you will have a moving sun/primary light, and/or if you want the terrain to be lit up by explosions, projectiles, etc. properly.

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Postby Aaron » Mon Dec 19, 2005 1:51 am

Hi Oshyan,

You do have a point. You can't currently export the fluvial/thermal erosion masks from L3DT. I might put that on the to-do list.

JavaJones wrote:I just haven't seen the simplicity and ease of use in masking from L3DT that I have from WM. You can easily do your own custom height and slope-based masks without having to edit a climate file.


The climate files are so very complex because they're not just height and slope dependent. To get pretty mask coverage, there is also curvature, water-table depth, and water-table salinity to take into account. It's these last two that make climate-editing tricky. However, if hight and slope are all that's required, then by all means, use WM.

JavaJones wrote:If your engine supports bump mapping natively then baking a bump map into your texture from a static light angle would kind of suck. But I guess if the engine doesn't do bump mapping it's the best way to get additional detail in the terrain. It just won't be light angle dependent, which is only an issue if you will have a moving sun/primary light, and/or if you want the terrain to be lit up by explosions, projectiles, etc. properly.


There probably aren't too many engines out there that can do dynamic terrain self-shadowing, so I'm guessing most users will be baking the pre-calculated lightmap onto the texture. In such cases, it doesn't hurt to also bake-on the bump map.

You can still do dynamic bump-mapping for explosion lighting too, but you have to make sure that the bump-mapping pass doesn't apply to the sun light source (as this is already baked-on).

Cheers,
Aaron.

PS: I've got the high-res lightmapping working, so you'll be able to do lighting/shadow-maps up to 32x as well. I haven't started on bump-mapping yet, but that will probably be a task for the new year.
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Postby JavaJones » Mon Dec 19, 2005 6:23 am

Yeah, don't get me wrong I'm all for more complex masking/climatology, etc. I just haven't gotten deep enough into it to be comfortable with its use in L3DT. Meanwhile WM does make it awfully easy to get some pretty good masks straight off. Adding basic direct output support for fluvial and other erosion masks would be a good idea IMO. :)

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