T3D 1.1 Preview - Deathball Desert visual artifacts - NOT A BUG

#21 Dumb idea here (I'm sure it is...) BUT...

Would it be possible to add in a render bin (I'm not sure the overhead per-bin) that renders AFTER opaque, but still with zwrite etc. to the prepass buffer... You'd have an mis-lit behind-geometry (potentially move items to this bin in the 0.2-0.999... alpha range...dropping to standard transparent under 0.2 or so) but it might have a better result than the "fizzle" effect?

The other option is of course to decide you don't care about popping, use imposters, and just disable the fizzle effect and have it just pop from the last mesh LOD to the imposter...

In the end there is no proper way to do this...so which "minimal effort" fix is possible that looks the least wrong?

#22 Is there a way to parameterize the distance to sub imposters? If so, then perhaps they can be switched farther from the camera and therefore would not be so noticeable.

#23 unfortunately do this this horrible visual effect I took imposters out of all of my models which really sucks as it really improved performance on my densely populated missions.

This is how bad it looked before I took out the imposters and autobillboards


something should be done to make it visually more appealing

#24 Ok, so yesterday when I marked this as not a bug (and it's staying that way because this is as designed) I had a very limited amount of time to do a quick scan of the forums. Mostly I was just doing a quick check to look for bugs to keep an eye our during the full pass. My aim was to knock this off David's radar so he didn't waste time logging it.

I assumed, incorrectly it seems, since this particular issue has been discussed and debated at least twice already here recently that it wasn't necessary. Or at least that another community member would come along and mention the previous discussions until I had chance to revisit this thread.

For the reasons that Matt explained this issue as an improvement is out of scope for 1.1. It may even be out of scope for beyond 1.1 as well, hard to say right now. We actually had a fair amount of debate about this one internally, but that is where our consensus fell.

Now, there are ways to mitigate the issue, which I think I saw one person mention. If you set up proper transition points for the LODs in the shape editor for your meshes then the effect becomes near unnoticeable. This does have the trade off of having noticeable pops but if you play with it enough you can bring it down to a point where it's not as jarring.

The new replacement Deathball is making use of this technique, which you guys will see in the Final release. There were some commit issues that prevented the replacement from being included in the Preview.

#25 Scott,

While the replacement DeathBall will make use of the technique, will there be any explainations on how to perform the technique? What settings I used or how I had the LOD set up the pixelation still occured and while you can hide the effect in a crowded forest but a single tree or object in the distance, still showed this effect very bad.

I have already solved my issue by changing my models to not use imposters or billboards at all.

But for poly count it would be nice to be able to use the features the engine provides and am greatly interested in how the technique was acomplished to make it near unnoticable.

#26 If someone would like to help GG out, I believe this was the technique they were going to explore as a possible solution to this:

Inferred Lighting

#27 G'day guys,

I don't know if this would work out, but it definitely might help, Deep deferred shading (halfway down the page) this really might fit into the pipeline and solve allot of issues, well a similar approach anyway seeing this is still a DX 9 rendering system.

Alex

#28 Here the permalink : Deep deferred shading

:-)