Landscape Building

[Sotha]

Hey, I had a thought how to make nice terrain for TDM. I'm not sure if it would work technically, so I'll post it for perusal for people more clever than me in modeling.

 

1) model a terrain, say 500m x 500m in blender (faster and easier than in DR)

2) draw a custom texture for the terrain. Fields, roads, cliffs, all are painted into the texture.

3) In blender, UV-unwrap the custom texture for the terrain model.

4) export ase, make the material for the custom texture and use it DR and in TDM.

 

This should allow really flexible terrain generation, without the need of doing vertex blending: you could make any kind of terrain and draw any kind of texture for the terrain piece. The thing that worries me is the maximum texture resolution for TDM. If I make a 500 x 500 meter terrain, the texture is bound to be huge if it was supposed to look good when the player stands on it! But would it really matter if the mission came with a single really big texture? Are there any technical limit for texture resolutions?

[STiFU]

That's basically megatexture what you're talking about and as far as I know, there are code snippets for that in D3 but it's not finished or something along those lines. However, there are certain difficulties with that approach. Actual free drawing is kind of problematic because you will also need normalmaps and specularmaps. So you would need some sort of specialyzed drawing utility, that also draws the accompanied normalmap of a "texture-brush" to your "meganormalmap".

[nbohr1more]

One thing you could do is make a large low resolution mask texture with 4 primary colors then use a material shader to

replace each color with a tiling texture. Sikkpin showed the technique here:

 

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=25344&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=300

[Springheel]

I looked at the thread but I have no idea how he did that.

[Obsttorte]

Instead of one big terrain piece you could create several single terrain pieces.

 

Btw.: Terrain generation is not really difficult in DR. It's true that it takes longer then in a modelling program, but in comparison with the total amount of time one has to invest into building a mission, this may not have an impact as high as you think.

 

The blending argument is the more valid point here I think. Although creating models with texture blends is not difficult in DR, one has to setup all the shaders needed. Maybe I'll spend the time writing a couple of those shaders to be used for terrain texturing, we'll see.

 

@nbohr1more: This looks neat. Did he posted the shader somewhere? Would be faster then to figuring this out on my own.

[Sotha]

Hey, this is pretty fast workflow with reasonable results.

 

I quickly sculpted a ~100m x 100m island. I painted some stock TDM textures on it using the blender texture paint. The texture was made to be 4096x4096, which weights 11Mb as dds texture.

 

In game it looks like this:

 

 

 

 

 

I suppose if I increase the texture dimensions, it should quite crispy even when the player is near. I'll try it later.

[Arcturus]

You could try baking ambient occlusion:

1. make sure that you have a uv map and a new image open in uv/image editor

2. Select the object

3. Go to render panel -> bake -> choose ambient occlusion from the list

 

For better result:

1) You may want to add Subsurf modifier for smoother shading

2) If you want less noise go to World panel and in 'Gather' change samples to higher number.

3) Check 'Normalized' in baking settings.

It works only in 'Blender renderer' (not Cycles).

 

[Serpentine]

I suppose if I increase the texture dimensions, it should quite crispy even when the player is near. I'll try it later.

Max texture res is 4kx4k for many common cards, 2kx2k for old stuff. Never stuff usually does 8/16k, but a lot that advertise 16k get all kinds of strange when its used.