Culmination of my labors. (Big pictures)
by Jacob Dankovchik · 11/02/2009 (12:12 am) · 14 comments
I finally put together a terrain in L3DT using my new materials. In doing so I actually came up with a new set of stuff that my art pack will ship with: L3DT climate files. I found that to efficiently utilize my materials I needed to make specific L3DT climates for them. I spent most of my time working on just one, the temperate climate. I'll also make a desert, arctic, and tropical.
My first tests left me pleased but at the same time slightly underwhelmed. I wasn't getting the amount of texture variation I was looking for. I also noticed I was getting some anomalous textures thrown into the mix. Then I finally managed to remove my head from my ass and realized that I wasn't using my new climate file....
After making that adjustment the results were very different. The images here are of a terrain I just threw together, no thought or design given to it. There are 17 different materials at use in it. The fog, sky, any environmental effects have not in any way been tweaked to where I would want them though. I put a tiny bit of thought of what I'd like to use to demonstrate and that was a rather wet mountain range, something to try to use several materials at once. With that said I'd normally have some fog adjustments, very different sky, maybe even some rain... lots of adjustments. Some trees would also be great. But you get the idea. And just to make you feel better, the sample environments will come with these things (minus the trees) and explained in a way that will allow you to effectively imitate them.
Moving on... This test has shown me a lot of different things. Overall I am greatly pleased however I notice that some of my base textures need adjustments. One of my rock textures needs completely trashed and redone as it just does not fit at all. My climate file also needs some major adjustments but I already knew that one. I love the large amount of texture variation I got, the nice spattering of different ground types instead of just one solid mass of a flat green and gray. At the same time though the variation is a bit too broken up for my tastes, I'd like to get more solid streaks instead of speckles. This is just a result of my climate file. The base textures, a couple just need minor adjustments to help them blend into others more smoothly.
Most of all though, this taught me something very important for all of you, and that is...
THIS IS NOT A BASIC PACK! THIS WILL NOT WORK WELL ON LOW END MACHINES! THIS IS INTENDED FOR MORE ADVANCED USAGE!
I just wanted to make sure I stressed that... With 17 textures in use all at once, each one made up of 4 different layers to create the individual effect you're looking at 68 total image layers, each one at 1024x1024. That is a lot. Trust me, it hits performance a bit hard. While I didn't have any noticeable FPS drop, I really never do. What I DID get was I could very clearly hear the fans on both (yes, I have two) Radeon HD4870s pick up speed. To put that into perspective, I've verry rarely gotten that from any game at all at full settings, full AA, AF, everything. Granted this is under totally unoptimized settings, nothing I'd expect someone to really try to use under these conditions. But still, it's safe to say that this isn't for the low end systems.
Anyhow, on with the pictures I promised!
My first tests left me pleased but at the same time slightly underwhelmed. I wasn't getting the amount of texture variation I was looking for. I also noticed I was getting some anomalous textures thrown into the mix. Then I finally managed to remove my head from my ass and realized that I wasn't using my new climate file....
After making that adjustment the results were very different. The images here are of a terrain I just threw together, no thought or design given to it. There are 17 different materials at use in it. The fog, sky, any environmental effects have not in any way been tweaked to where I would want them though. I put a tiny bit of thought of what I'd like to use to demonstrate and that was a rather wet mountain range, something to try to use several materials at once. With that said I'd normally have some fog adjustments, very different sky, maybe even some rain... lots of adjustments. Some trees would also be great. But you get the idea. And just to make you feel better, the sample environments will come with these things (minus the trees) and explained in a way that will allow you to effectively imitate them.
Moving on... This test has shown me a lot of different things. Overall I am greatly pleased however I notice that some of my base textures need adjustments. One of my rock textures needs completely trashed and redone as it just does not fit at all. My climate file also needs some major adjustments but I already knew that one. I love the large amount of texture variation I got, the nice spattering of different ground types instead of just one solid mass of a flat green and gray. At the same time though the variation is a bit too broken up for my tastes, I'd like to get more solid streaks instead of speckles. This is just a result of my climate file. The base textures, a couple just need minor adjustments to help them blend into others more smoothly.
Most of all though, this taught me something very important for all of you, and that is...
THIS IS NOT A BASIC PACK! THIS WILL NOT WORK WELL ON LOW END MACHINES! THIS IS INTENDED FOR MORE ADVANCED USAGE!
I just wanted to make sure I stressed that... With 17 textures in use all at once, each one made up of 4 different layers to create the individual effect you're looking at 68 total image layers, each one at 1024x1024. That is a lot. Trust me, it hits performance a bit hard. While I didn't have any noticeable FPS drop, I really never do. What I DID get was I could very clearly hear the fans on both (yes, I have two) Radeon HD4870s pick up speed. To put that into perspective, I've verry rarely gotten that from any game at all at full settings, full AA, AF, everything. Granted this is under totally unoptimized settings, nothing I'd expect someone to really try to use under these conditions. But still, it's safe to say that this isn't for the low end systems.
Anyhow, on with the pictures I promised!
#2
but what happens with the resolution in the center of the pictures... it's too blurred...
11/02/2009 (7:25 am)
The foreground and the far background looks good,but what happens with the resolution in the center of the pictures... it's too blurred...
#3
11/02/2009 (8:46 am)
In the center what your most likely seeing is that its too far to use the detail texture, but its not far enough to look detailed without it. You'd generally want to cover that up with trees, obstructions or whatnot, or make the detail texture stretch a bit farther. 
#4
11/02/2009 (9:22 am)
Plus, I think he might have depth of field on. 
#5
11/02/2009 (10:36 am)
I like it a lot, your detailed terrains are a pleasure to look at. 
#6
11/02/2009 (1:49 pm)
looks good, you may want to raise the terrain detail to 2048 (will fix the spots) and set the detail texture distance much higher. those little white dots look like specular lighting coming from the parallax distortion. 
#7
11/02/2009 (2:56 pm)
Those pictures are a vast improvement on a lot of things I have seen but it still make me think that the whole base texture systems need to be re-done. IMHO the T3D terrain in the distance is defiantly the engines weakest point as it currently stands. We are not even using the terrain system in our project. It is just too painful to look at. I think just a 4K hand-painted map would look better than what is there now. Great job though Jacob! Keep up the good work. Great work especially when you consider the system you have working against you.
#8
11/02/2009 (4:36 pm)
@ James, pehaps you are overlooking some settings. the default settings look bad. up the texture detail distance and resolution and you can get some really nice result both far and near 
#9
Great pictures!
11/02/2009 (7:04 pm)
Well, sure, a 4x4 km hand-painted map ( I assume you mean a single big mesh / TSStatic ) could look better, but collision and rendering of it is going to be terrible compared to a TerrainBlock of the same size.Great pictures!
#10
Actually setting the base texture resolution higher makes it more obvious, it's a climate issue, not a resolution one. The detail distance I'm going to just leave at default values and leave it up to the user to set his own values since those have a significant effect on both visual quality and performance. And if that's too hard for people do work out then they really shouldn't be buying this to begin with, I think.
11/02/2009 (10:04 pm)
Quote:looks good, you may want to raise the terrain detail to 2048 (will fix the spots) and set the detail texture distance much higher. those little white dots look like specular lighting coming from the parallax distortion.
Actually setting the base texture resolution higher makes it more obvious, it's a climate issue, not a resolution one. The detail distance I'm going to just leave at default values and leave it up to the user to set his own values since those have a significant effect on both visual quality and performance. And if that's too hard for people do work out then they really shouldn't be buying this to begin with, I think.
#11
I hope you're able to get the performance up somehow. These days, I think the least realistic part of a 3-D scene is usually the terrain.
11/04/2009 (3:41 pm)
Man those look great, especially that third-from-last screenshot. That one looks photorealistic.I hope you're able to get the performance up somehow. These days, I think the least realistic part of a 3-D scene is usually the terrain.
#12
Bravo! The up-close detail from those materials is just awesome.
If I could offer one tip it would be to play around with the resolution of the base texture DDS somewhat, as this should add extra detail to the middle-distance. Here's a quick couple of examples I cooked up using 1x, 4x, 8x and 16x resolution for the L3DT texture map, attributes map, normal map and light map:
Note that I'm not using any detail maps or runtime bump mapping there; that's just the detail provided by the base texture from L3DT using the stock 'temperate' climate and materials.
I should also note that, in the last image, the base texture is 8192x8192 pixels, so it may be a little over the top for real game usage. YMMV.
Best regards,
Aaron.
11/11/2009 (10:30 am)
Hi Jacob,Bravo! The up-close detail from those materials is just awesome.
If I could offer one tip it would be to play around with the resolution of the base texture DDS somewhat, as this should add extra detail to the middle-distance. Here's a quick couple of examples I cooked up using 1x, 4x, 8x and 16x resolution for the L3DT texture map, attributes map, normal map and light map:
Note that I'm not using any detail maps or runtime bump mapping there; that's just the detail provided by the base texture from L3DT using the stock 'temperate' climate and materials.
I should also note that, in the last image, the base texture is 8192x8192 pixels, so it may be a little over the top for real game usage. YMMV.
Best regards,
Aaron.
#13
11/11/2009 (10:44 am)
These shots were done before I had picked up your exporter for L3DT so this is T3D's generated texture. But even so, I hadn't thought of doing what you suggest there quite yet... Looks like I have some experimenting to do.
#14
Oh, silly me. I hadn't understood that the colour maps were being blended by T3D in your screenshots. It all makes sense then; since the material mask has a fixed resolution of 1x the heightfield size in the TER file format, it follows that the blended colour map will look pixellated at certain distances, just like if you were using a base texture with 1x resolution.
Hmmm...'twould be really nice if T3D and the TER format supported high-resolution material masks. We used to have this option with blended Atlas files in TGEA, did we not?
Best regards,
Aaron.
11/11/2009 (5:01 pm)
Hi Jacob,Oh, silly me. I hadn't understood that the colour maps were being blended by T3D in your screenshots. It all makes sense then; since the material mask has a fixed resolution of 1x the heightfield size in the TER file format, it follows that the blended colour map will look pixellated at certain distances, just like if you were using a base texture with 1x resolution.
Hmmm...'twould be really nice if T3D and the TER format supported high-resolution material masks. We used to have this option with blended Atlas files in TGEA, did we not?
Best regards,
Aaron.
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