Torque 3D Environment Pack 1.1 Progress Report
by Jacob Dankovchik · 08/01/2011 (4:56 am) · 3 comments
Product Page: www.darkphoenixsoftware.com/index.php?p=1_7
Well, I've been working like crazy on this project, some would argue to an unhealthy degree (but really, who needs sleep/food anyhow?). I've finally got the textures processed in terms of tiling, naming, and normal/parallax maps. Still have to do the detail maps but thankfully that's the easiest of it all (yes, even easier than naming.. you'll see).
Before I take that step though, I am working on the L3DT climate file types, since that is a very important part, in my opinion. While not affiliated with L3DT in any way, I stand by it very strongly as being a hugely powerful tool and so this pack is, as always, made to work with it for the convenience of any owners of L3DT. With this new pool of textures, I can achieve a new level of effect that I hadn't previously been able to do...
So here is some explanation.. You can skip this if you don't care and just want more solid info... This is just about my reasoning. Some of you may remember the old terrain rendering program, Terragen. Something I've always noticed is the programs method of texturing, in that it uses a very large amount of noise. Which makes sense really because the real world is very noisy itself with color, it's by no means one single sheet of grass that covers everything; it constantly changes in seemingly random ways. I've gone ahead and begun applying this line of thinking to my terrain files, utilizing massive amounts of noise in the creation, as well as extremely finely tuned texture weights so that the tiniest changes in the terrain will call for a different material. So far the results have been highly promising, albeit painful to tweak it all in.
Here is an example of a current L3DT attributes map for the first climate file which I just began today, the Temperate Base. This climate is designed to be for a sort of general, basic temperate area. There will also be other Temperates, such as Coastal, Wet, Dry, and Cold. Since the temperate climate is so diverse, I'll have to make multiple types to attempt to meet all the different styles possible.
So anyhow, the attributes map. In here all I have so far is most of the grass that this climate will make use of and some of the rocks. Still a lot to go. Each different color is a different material.
Preliminary tests seem very promising with matching my theory, testing with a rough, untweaked base texture shows that it appears to be working in the way I want: The massive amounts of material changes creates a much more convincing look.
Also something to bring up, because I think it's kind of amusing. Remember how I mentioned that naming is actually harder than even making the detail maps? (in fact, naming was practically as hard as making each normal map) Well, here is why! Each material is named with a rough estimation of it's fitting weights, something both to help with programming into L3DT and also for manually painting the textures. These filename weights should help with estimating what to use where, but of course they are only rough suggestion in any case.
What it means: G is gradient, the slope of the surface. C is curvature, the general roughness of the area. W is water, how wet the ground is supposed to be. S is for salinity, if the material favors salty ground or not. And RF is the Random Factor, this is for how much noise is applied to the material. All numbers, except for RF, range from N5 (negative five) to 5. RF only ranges from 0 to 4.
And of course, last but not least, the textures themselves, laid out all together! There are 355 here! Yes, THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FIVE. That is over SEVEN TIMES an increase in content from the 1.0 version of the Environment Kit, for the same price! (And FREE for people who already own it)
And of course each and every one has been individually configured. They have all received tiling processing based on what the material itself is, not just to make it sorta work, and all normal maps and parallax maps were tested in multiple angles and light levels on every material before being finalized.
All texture formats (with the exception of those used by L3DT itself) will be delivered in TGA format (the only reason they're in PNG right now is for processing purposes), except for the normal/parallax which will be in uncompressed DDS. If wondering, yes, T3D CAN in fact use TGA for base/detail maps even though it doesn't look for it by default in the browser. The reason for using TGA is because, performance wise, it is superior to PNG. Don't forget that PNG is compressed and so when used, must be decompressed which does in fact sap some processing time. Since TGA is the highest performance, that is what's delivered; any reduction in performance, size, detail, or whatever have you is left up to the customer. And another plus is the zip file itself you would download won't be any bigger; since PNG is already compressed, it receives no benefit from zipping while TGA does.
So there you have it. That's my progress report! It's now 5 am and I think it's time for me to get back to work, typing this has cost a precious twenty minutes!!
Product Page: www.darkphoenixsoftware.com/index.php?p=1_7
Well, I've been working like crazy on this project, some would argue to an unhealthy degree (but really, who needs sleep/food anyhow?). I've finally got the textures processed in terms of tiling, naming, and normal/parallax maps. Still have to do the detail maps but thankfully that's the easiest of it all (yes, even easier than naming.. you'll see).
Before I take that step though, I am working on the L3DT climate file types, since that is a very important part, in my opinion. While not affiliated with L3DT in any way, I stand by it very strongly as being a hugely powerful tool and so this pack is, as always, made to work with it for the convenience of any owners of L3DT. With this new pool of textures, I can achieve a new level of effect that I hadn't previously been able to do...
So here is some explanation.. You can skip this if you don't care and just want more solid info... This is just about my reasoning. Some of you may remember the old terrain rendering program, Terragen. Something I've always noticed is the programs method of texturing, in that it uses a very large amount of noise. Which makes sense really because the real world is very noisy itself with color, it's by no means one single sheet of grass that covers everything; it constantly changes in seemingly random ways. I've gone ahead and begun applying this line of thinking to my terrain files, utilizing massive amounts of noise in the creation, as well as extremely finely tuned texture weights so that the tiniest changes in the terrain will call for a different material. So far the results have been highly promising, albeit painful to tweak it all in.
Here is an example of a current L3DT attributes map for the first climate file which I just began today, the Temperate Base. This climate is designed to be for a sort of general, basic temperate area. There will also be other Temperates, such as Coastal, Wet, Dry, and Cold. Since the temperate climate is so diverse, I'll have to make multiple types to attempt to meet all the different styles possible.
So anyhow, the attributes map. In here all I have so far is most of the grass that this climate will make use of and some of the rocks. Still a lot to go. Each different color is a different material.
Preliminary tests seem very promising with matching my theory, testing with a rough, untweaked base texture shows that it appears to be working in the way I want: The massive amounts of material changes creates a much more convincing look.
Also something to bring up, because I think it's kind of amusing. Remember how I mentioned that naming is actually harder than even making the detail maps? (in fact, naming was practically as hard as making each normal map) Well, here is why! Each material is named with a rough estimation of it's fitting weights, something both to help with programming into L3DT and also for manually painting the textures. These filename weights should help with estimating what to use where, but of course they are only rough suggestion in any case.
What it means: G is gradient, the slope of the surface. C is curvature, the general roughness of the area. W is water, how wet the ground is supposed to be. S is for salinity, if the material favors salty ground or not. And RF is the Random Factor, this is for how much noise is applied to the material. All numbers, except for RF, range from N5 (negative five) to 5. RF only ranges from 0 to 4.
And of course, last but not least, the textures themselves, laid out all together! There are 355 here! Yes, THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FIVE. That is over SEVEN TIMES an increase in content from the 1.0 version of the Environment Kit, for the same price! (And FREE for people who already own it)
And of course each and every one has been individually configured. They have all received tiling processing based on what the material itself is, not just to make it sorta work, and all normal maps and parallax maps were tested in multiple angles and light levels on every material before being finalized.
All texture formats (with the exception of those used by L3DT itself) will be delivered in TGA format (the only reason they're in PNG right now is for processing purposes), except for the normal/parallax which will be in uncompressed DDS. If wondering, yes, T3D CAN in fact use TGA for base/detail maps even though it doesn't look for it by default in the browser. The reason for using TGA is because, performance wise, it is superior to PNG. Don't forget that PNG is compressed and so when used, must be decompressed which does in fact sap some processing time. Since TGA is the highest performance, that is what's delivered; any reduction in performance, size, detail, or whatever have you is left up to the customer. And another plus is the zip file itself you would download won't be any bigger; since PNG is already compressed, it receives no benefit from zipping while TGA does.
So there you have it. That's my progress report! It's now 5 am and I think it's time for me to get back to work, typing this has cost a precious twenty minutes!!
Product Page: www.darkphoenixsoftware.com/index.php?p=1_7
Torque Owner Jules
Something2Play