Star Wars - Environment Art Questions

Maximum-Dev

Managed to play this beauty and got some questions in mind that I can hopefully get some direction to reproduce the effect in UE4.

Q1: Like 80% of the meshes translate seamless to the other meshes. You can look at the rocks from desert/canyon/snow maps to see what I mean. There is no hard line at the intersection with terrain.

Q2: Is it tessellation, or pixel depth offset, or something else that makes very tiny details to pop out as well? Notice the little sand slopes. (Performance is so good!)

Or this little guy here that I had to zoom in on him.

Q3: On all levels there are a lot of places that have details in a way that you can't really have sculpted on a regular terrain. Such as lines like this below. How can this be done on a terrain?



Cheers to you!

LMP

There are a few possibilities. Vertex Color Blending.

bugo

It's probably blending with a 2nd uvs set.

And it's definitely tesselation.

Obscura

Not completely sure if its tessellation with displacement. It can  be a parallax occlusion mapping also.

For the blend, there are a couple of possibilities:
http://polycount.com/discussion/148143/ue4-terrain-mesh-normal-blending

bugo

Obscura, while its touching the edge of another model on Pom it would not create silhouette like he showed, it has to move the verts. Unless they are using silhouette POM, which is quite expensive.

http://docs.cryengine.com/plugins/servlet/mobile#content/view/1048726

Maximum-Dev

Using DistanceToNearestSurface I can easily mask out the mesh to mesh intersections however, the problem I'm facing is the landscape itself doesn't contribute to global distance fields so it just doesn't create a mask at mesh to landscape intersection.
Any ideas?

Maximum-Dev

Another question I have is that those lines on the terrain are carved out very nice and clean. Not a thing to do with something like world machine at all. Nor something we can do with the in-engine sculpt tools. Does anyone know any tricks about that?

kurt_hectic

It's not a trick....they just destroyed the system, raised the bar, have awesome tech.  I bought this game just to look at the graphics. There is no pixels, no tiling, no visible triangles. Pure awesomeness. For me it's the best graphics of this type so far.


CLICK ON: "LOAD MORE IMG..." there is ~100 of them

http://imgur.com/gallery/ib8nW

http://imgur.com/gallery/GinWK

http://imgur.com/gallery/86NSf

kurt_hectic

But it also reminded me imgs from Rise:

Noors

Maximum-Dev said:

Another question I have is that those lines on the terrain are carved out very nice and clean. Not a thing to do with something like world machine at all. Nor something we can do with the in-engine sculpt tools. Does anyone know any tricks about that?

Sculpted in Zbrush then.

Maximum-Dev

Not sure if the whole terrain is a mesh. I know that they have used satellite data for the maps but some places have very smaller details than you can fit into terrain category. Either their terrain is a mesh or their terrain system is now far beyond what UE4 can do.

GlowingPotato

If the use the same tech for BF5... god help us all.

Maximum-Dev

Here's a close up of the "lines".



Could be a POMed (new word?)  layer used with their road tool to draw these lines?
I'm feeling pretty horrible to see we're left behind so much.

ActionDawg

They use tessellation + POM apparently.

xChris

I'm equally astonished about how much love went into these environments. I love how the ice caves look too, anyone know how you can get something close to this in UE4? I'm wondering if they use an emissive map for the glow. In some angles you can tell its kind of a bump off set or depth they use, but there are other angles where the light source itself makes the glow react differently when your running by. Awesome stuff, lets discuss!

endeffect

As i know from battlefield games, frostbite uses megatextures for terrain, so even smallest details on heightmap is possible as resolution is enough for most of the details. Can't find the source atm but still looking for.

Maximum-Dev

Ummmmm actually they do not use mega textures. They do virtual texturing.
I'm hoping for some presentations, those would be very helpful. (if any)

Maximum-Dev

Some examples of mesh transition to terrain.










^ That last one seems to be another story..

GlowingPotato

The first image in the post above... Is there any chance that the rock you are aiming at, is in same mesh as the terrain ? Because the other rocks on the background does't have the same blend as this one. And OMFG, if this rock is an actual object, the texture blend is perfect.

bugo

Maybe, but just maybe they are using zdepthbias to blend inbetween meshes, there's also the possibility of projected uv mapping for parts of the mesh, so when you quickly place an object it could have a "skirt" blended there. There's another possibility which is world coordinate projection. We hand placed skirt meshes on The Order, because didn't have such tech.

Maximum-Dev

Apart from the blending, now I'm wondering if rocks in this game use unique albedo maps at all. I have seen a lot of strange stretching effects where it's very identical to projection mapping.

GlowingPotato

That stretching, isn't because of the tessellation ?

Maximum-Dev

No not tessellation. But not sure what.

bugo

that looks like projected uvs to me.

Maximum-Dev

Say if they're projecting the snow texture along the height axis in the rock material, there should still be a way to A) where the rock texture should stop and let the projected texture appear and B ) terminate the lighting seam.

bugo

in Unreal that's called zdepth bias, it's the same technique of soft particles, it's a considered cheap nowadays method to blend things that are near each other and you can use that as a lerp mask. It's one of the reasons I'm in favor of graph shading freedom to the artist. But there's always a negative point to it, the artist not knowing how to handle it, or bad optimization of shaders.

Basically this is what this sample is using as transparency: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/images/Engine/Rendering/Materials/ExpressionReference/Depth/DepthFade1.jpg

You can simply add that as a mask and with world projection you can get what you're looking for.

Maximum-Dev

bugo said:

in Unreal that's called zdepth bias, it's the same technique of soft particles, it's a considered cheap nowadays method to blend things that are near each other and you can use that as a lerp mask. It's one of the reasons I'm in favor of graph shading freedom to the artist. But there's always a negative point to it, the artist not knowing how to handle it, or bad optimization of shaders.

Basically this is what this sample is using as transparency: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/images/Engine/Rendering/Materials/ExpressionReference/Depth/DepthFade1.jpg

You can simply add that as a mask and with world projection you can get what you're looking for.

But DepthFade only works for Translucent materials, or you know of a way to use with Opaque?

bugo

I don't think it's only translucent, are you sure? In any other engine that should be a technique where it finds the distance of other meshes, and it outputs a float value, and then you can input that as a mask for opacity.

Maximum-Dev

bugo said:

I don't think it's only translucent, are you sure? In any other engine that should be a technique where it finds the distance of other meshes, and it outputs a float value, and then you can input that as a mask for opacity.

Yeah the error I get basically says it doesn't work with Opaque materials unfortunately.

Maximum-Dev

Maximum-Dev said:

Here's a close up of the "lines".



Could be a POMed (new word?)  layer used with their road tool to draw these lines?
I'm feeling pretty horrible to see we're left behind so much.

I was looking closer last night. These lines are definitely POMed layers used with their road tool.
When crouching and look at them closely from side it's possible to see the POM steps.

Noors

Stepped upon cool stuff here:
http://fr.slideshare.net/VesselinEfremov/authoring-of-procedural-rocks-in-the-blacksmith-realtime-short-51753674
And it appeared the guy used my script  
So the distorted uv might be caused by a displacement map and planar mapping

GlowingPotato

Noors said:

Stepped upon cool stuff here:
http://fr.slideshare.net/VesselinEfremov/authoring-of-procedural-rocks-in-the-blacksmith-realtime-short-51753674
And it appeared the guy used my script  
So the distorted uv might be caused by a displacement map and planar mapping

Thats some amazing stuff! I wonder, how they manage to use a lot of unique textures without blowing up the Vram.

Maximum-Dev

A little test for mesh to landscape blending.

GlowingPotato

looks pretty good, what is your approach ?

Maximum-Dev

Rock uses the same texture as landscape. Then actual textures for rock are added on top of that using a world aligned blend node.
Landscape texture is using a world aligned texture node for 3D projection in both landscape and rock.

Jack M.

That usually does 80% of the work for blending stuff. The thing that still stumps me is the clashing of vertex normals between the intersecting mesh and the terrain/other meshes that cause lighting seams. It appears that Dice may have developed a specific lighting model or shader to get around that.

Obscura

I thought you might be interested in this. I achieved this look with using pixel depth offset. But unfortunately this feature seems very limited in UE. it can go only inwards (even if your hightmap is in range of 1, -1...), and sometimes , especially if you use big values, it can causes incorrect lighting, because it won't offset the shadows. But in some cases its not visible....

Maximum-Dev

I gave PDO a try. But tessellation seems to be very cheaper in terms of performance?

Obscura

No. Because the only thing that PDO really does is it offset your material in the scene depth, while tessellation use continuous distance measurement to control the amount of tessellation,  and vertex offset. As I see PDO is almost free at least compared to tessellation/displacement. Also PDO can easily work with weak, old graphic cards without a noticeable performance drop , while tessellation is a dx11 feature and its also very polygon heavy. It really slows down the rendering if you use it on many objects.

Technically both of these are per pixel  effects, because you sample a height map, but tessellation/displacement do a lot of extra things.
PDO is expensive only where the transition is, but it has roughly the same cost as transparency, regarding the shader complexity view, while tessellation/displacement makes the whole mesh/material expensive.

Maximum-Dev

Obscura said:

No. Because the only thing that PDO really does is it offset your material in the scene depth, while tessellation use continuous distance measurement to control the amount of tessellation,  and vertex offset. As I see PDO is almost free at least compared to tessellation/displacement. Also PDO can easily work with weak, old graphic cards without a noticeable performance drop , while tessellation is a dx11 feature and its also very polygon heavy. It really slows down the rendering if you use it on many objects.

Technically both of these are per pixel  effects, because you sample a height map, but tessellation/displacement do a lot of extra things.
PDO is expensive only where the transition is, but it has roughly the same cost as transparency, regarding the shader complexity view, while tessellation/displacement makes the whole mesh/material expensive.

Then maybe I've done it wrong. So much instructions when I use the PDO slot. Can you please attach your PDO material .uasset here if possible so I can take a look?

Obscura

Since it ignores negative values, you simply need to plug in your heightmap. You can have a multiplier of course. 

Maximum-Dev

Thanks. Plugging the map directly to PDO works. And is cheap. Only problem is it introduces some AO like effect.

Obscura

Whats the value of your multiplier? I think its determined in world space so if you set it to 5 them it will mean 5 cm.

kurt_hectic

http://www.frostbite.com/2016/03/photogrammetry-and-star-wars-battlefront/

so,
-they projected light from terrain on to meshes?
-and used world uv's on terrain and meshes?

If yes I figured it out few years ago and used it on project I done on UE4. That was super easy and gave me good results. I was able to paint on the ground and all custom meshes, soil, sidewalks ect. and I got seamless transitions:


. 

Maximum-Dev

OBSCURA, 5 Almost gave nothing to rely on so I had to up it a bit more. Hence the shadows.
KURT_HECTIC, In your example those entities are all meshes. No landscape.

I just downloaded the .pptx and I'm a little shocked to see all we got is this slide. Is there anybody who can shed some light on "Terrain radiosity projected on to them" phrase please?

leleuxart

Could be something like GI based on the terrain heightmap. Isn't Frostbite using Enlighten still? Might be something it offers that's similar to Epic's heightmap GI.

GlowingPotato

@kurt_hectic
Can you explain a little more how that transiton is working ?

Maximum-Dev

GlowingPotato said:

@kurt_hectic
Can you explain a little more how that transiton is working ?

I think that's basically using the same landscape texture in your sidewalk material and vertex paint the sidewalk.

PaulH

That presentation is super duper! I'm adding this here in case it alludes to a solution for the mesh/landscape interesection/tangent normals issue? What RyanB is suggests in the link seems straight forward, but I was unable to get it working seamlessly.

https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/61109/how-do-you-manipulate-light-vectors-in-blueprints.html

GlowingPotato

Maximum-Dev said:

GlowingPotato said:

@kurt_hectic
Can you explain a little more how that transiton is working ?

I think that's basically using the same landscape texture in your sidewalk material and vertex paint the sidewalk.

So thats a pretty high res mesh right? To paint the dirt between the pebbles ...

Maximum-Dev

GlowingPotato said:

Maximum-Dev said:

GlowingPotato said:

@kurt_hectic
Can you explain a little more how that transiton is working ?

I think that's basically using the same landscape texture in your sidewalk material and vertex paint the sidewalk.

So thats a pretty high res mesh right? To paint the dirt between the pebbles ...

No. You'd just need to make a mask for the blending and overlay it with the vertex paint data.


@Paulh, I have absolutely no knowledge of blueprints. Would be nice if you could figure it out though.