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I am dissatisfied with my terrain. How can it look better?

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I am dissatisfied with my terrain. How can it look better?

Postby joehot200 » Thu Apr 28, 2016 9:08 pm

Hello,

I am creating a game called PlaneStorm, with a terrain generated by L3DT. It looks good, but I just don't feel it looks good enough.

From a distance, it looks great:
Image
Image

But when flying over it, it just doesn't feel... Quite there.

Image
Image
Image

I have looked up pictures of L3DT, and I see images like this:
Image
Image
Image
The thing about these images is that they all look like professional terrains that would be used in a professional game. Mine does not.

Alright, so what to do? Well, I looked it up, and the best I could find was your article on texture splatting, which looked like this:
Image
I thought this looked great and would be a great solution to my problems, but unfortunately this has turned out to be a complete flop:
Image
Image
Image

And really, at the moment, the splatted textures look worse than the pre-generated megatextures.

There is no way I can make bigger megatextures. I already use 4x resolution, which takes up 1.5GB of RAM.

What I am asking is:
What am I doing wrong? Why does my terrain not look professional?
What tips or techniques could I use to make my terrain look better?
Why do all the terrains I see generated by L3DT look so professional, but mine does not?

Thank you,
Joe

Edit: I've just added a detail map. It looks better, but again, it just isn't quite there.
joehot200
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Re: I am dissatisfied with my terrain. How can it look bette

Postby Aaron » Fri Apr 29, 2016 1:10 pm

Hi Joe,

I'm sorry, I should probably have a better tutorial for terrain for flight sims. You've obviously gone to a lot of effort, and I feel kinda bad that I hadn't been of more assistance sooner.

My first observation of your terrain was that it looked a bit too lumpy, like the fractal noise setting is too high. Back this off, and maybe increase the erosion. Can you send me the map definition file (*.def.xml), so that I can have a look at the settings to see if I can find a happier combination? (please send to aaron@bundysoft.com).

Also, the cliff faces really demand a higher-resolution texture, or they just look blurry. If you're stuck with 4x texture resolution, maybe back off on the steepness and/or the cliffs/terraces.

Did you use water table modelling? It looks like you've got a lot of dry grass there, which looks a bit out of place on the side of snow-capped mountains by the sea. With appropriate use of the water table you could get some nice lush valleys, which would spruce things up a bit (again, with the map definition file I could tweak the water table modelling params).

The lighting also looks a bit flat. The terrain would look more striking if the sun was a little lower in the sky, as it better shows off the topography. In the range of 30-60 degrees elevation is good.

Using the above advice, I got to something like that shown below. This was using a 2048x2048 pixel heightfield, 10m heighfield resolution, with 4x resolution for attributes map, normals map, light map and texture map. All default settings for the heightfield parameters. No manual editing; all automatically generated:

for_joe_2.jpg


for_joe_1.jpg


Although L3DT doesn't much help with this, I'd also recommend you think about scattering trees and bushes around, even if really low poly sprites. Bare ground looks suspiciously unnatural, unless you change to a desert or arctic climate.

Regarding texture splatting; it's great for close-up detail, but it's always poor at far-away visuals, so if you're going to use splatting you need to fade it out to a pre-calculated texture in the distance. This is not uncommon in commercial game engines. I'd think with a flight sim you could probably skip the splatting and just use a detail map.

I would also point out that the example images from the high-res texture tutorial used either lots of vegetation to cover the lack of detail in the ground textures, or a much higher resolution textures. Higher-resolution textures would help, but as I'm sure you're aware, they're really big. Ideally you'd want a texture paging and level of detail algorithm to handle the larger textures (say, 8x), but I fully understand that's going to be a lot of work.

Anyway, I hope this helps a little.

Best regards,
Aaron.
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Re: I am dissatisfied with my terrain. How can it look bette

Postby joehot200 » Fri Apr 29, 2016 8:40 pm

Aaron,

I have taken your detail map from Resources (default)\Climates\common\detail\detailmap.jpg and used the following shader algorithm (if you could call it that):

Code: Select all
      vec2 detTex = newTexCoord * vec2(40, 40); //40 is the tiling value.
      float detailIntensity = 1.3; //Higher intensity = more detail map. lower intensity = less
      vec4 detail = texture2D(m_DetailMap, detTex); //Sample the detail map texture
      detail *= vec4(detailIntensity);  //Multiple by intensity
      vec4 detail2 = texture2D(m_DetailMap, detTex / vec2(4)); //Sample a second detail map, this time more stretched (to look better from distances)
      detail2 *= vec4(detailIntensity); //Multiply the second detail map
      detail += detail2; //Add detail2 to detail1.
      detail /= vec4(2); //Divide detail by 2, so that both maps are combined.
      vec4 detailColor = vec4(1.0) - detail; //As your image, is white with black lines, I am inverting it. So the white is now the black.
      vec4 diffuseColor = texture2D(m_DiffuseMap, newTexCoord); //I get the colour of the megatexture over the mesh
     
      diffuseColor += detailColor; //I add the colour of the detail map onto the fragment colour


Depending on the intensity, it can range from results like this:
Image
To results like this:
Image
Which I am personally very pleased with.

It also makes cliffs look very nice, which I am pleased with (as I do need hills for the nature of the game):
Image

It is late at night where I am, so I will be working on the other things you have suggested soon. I may be able to add a light scattering filter into the game, or try some other tricks. Adding vegetation is not very easy in the engine I am using, but I might give that a go too.

Any suggestions on any further (especially terrain settings in L3DT) would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Joe
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Re: I am dissatisfied with my terrain. How can it look bette

Postby Aaron » Sat Apr 30, 2016 1:15 am

Hi Joe,

Thanks for the settings file. I'm looking into it now, and I'll have some suggestions ASAP (probably tomorrow or Monday). From what I can see, though, my first guesses seemed to have turned out right. The fractal roughness was turned up to 100%, which made the terrain too bumpy. The water table water table calculation was done, but after the attributes map was generated, so it had no effect on the land types, and consequently the grass turned out dry. Also, the attributes map and normals maps were generated at 1x resolution. These should 4x, to match the light map and texture. More to come when time permits.

Best regards,
Aaron.
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Aaron
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Re: I am dissatisfied with my terrain. How can it look bette

Postby Aaron » Mon May 02, 2016 12:16 pm

Hi Joe,

Okay, using your settings L3DT generated a map that looked like this:

Image

...which, I think, looks pretty much like the map you had. After adjusting a few settings and re-generating some maps (listed below), I got it to this:

Image

...which I think looks alright (except for the water, but Sapphire doesn't have a water shader, so that's expected).

Before I get to the changed settings, I'd suggest you make a copy of the entire project folder, just in case you don't like the changes and want to revert. Anyway...

  • The first change I made was to go to 'Operations->Design map->Modify map parameters' in the menu. Here, set the 'noise shape' slider back to the middle. It was at 100% fractal, which makes the terrain too lumpy.
  • Next, open the calculation wizard ('Operations->Calculation wizard' in menu), and select (in order), heightfield, water map, attributes map, terrain normals, light map, and texture map, and click 'Next'.
  • In the 'Water flooding' wizard pane, ensure the 'Calculate water table' checkbox is checked.
  • In the 'Attributes map calc.' wizard pane, check the 'Make high-res attributes map' checkbox, and set 'AM/HF ratio' to 4.
  • In the 'Normal mapping' wizard pane, check the 'Apply bump-mapping' and 'Make high-res normals map' checkboxes, and set 'TN/HF ratio' to 4.
  • In the 'Light mapping' wizard pane, set the elevation to a lower angle (I used 40).
  • In the second 'Light mapping' wizard pane (7/8), check the 'Make high-res light map' checkbox, and set 'LM/HF ratio' to 4.
  • In 'Texture settings' wizard pane, set the anti-aliasing radius to 4.
  • When you click OK, the calculation will start.

Please let me know if you find any problems.

Best regards,
Aaron.
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