grain layer above textures.. <what is it called> ?

Belias

Hello



I found this technique used in Bayonneta
it puts a grain layer over the blury texture < more obvious when the camera is near a wall>

what is this technology called?

because I want to use it in unity.

fatihG_

Detail textures. Unity has built in shaders that do this iirc.

Xendance

Basically multiply the colour texture with a greyscale detail texture that is scaled down in the shader so it tiles more.

Belias

thanks
details for other people who want to know
http://www.moddb.com/games/overgrowth/news/detail-textures

any website that tells wether if an Iphone can withstand these things?

Eric Chadwick

Belias wrote: »

thanks
details for other people who want to know
http://www.moddb.com/games/overgrowth/news/detail-textures

any website that tells wether if an Iphone can withstand these things?

iPhone 4 uses the PowerVR chipset IIRC, which is a decent amount of rendering power. But whether it does detail mapping simply depends on which game engine you're using. If it supports custom shaders, then you can probably make your own.

[HP]

You mean detail normal maps? It's just a tilling normal map, typically pretty small like 256*256 to give surfaces a more high frequency look, helps getting rid of blurry materials.

jerry

HP is right on the money. Don't know if that's what Bayonetta uses but this will most likely give you the most bang for your buck

SpeCter

If you use the detail texture approach overgrowth uses, it should be fine on iDevices.
Just a litte calculation + some detail textures blended into the original ones tinted in the original color will give relatively good results and should be less costly compared to adding normal maps.

Adam L. Gray

If you're just after a bit of grain and want to save on file-size and performance though, then with the view angle you have in your image there, a simple film grain might do quite well too.. Not sure if it's available in Unity however

malcolm

A detail normal map is the fancy version, some people go the grey scale multiply route because it costs more to render the detail normal, or so I have been told by my rendering engineer. An interesting topic, I've noticed all the modern fps games have moved away from detail textures in favour of higher res diffuse textures that tile less. I totally expected to see detail maps of some kind in Crysis 2, Rage, and BF3, but there was none. I used these back in 2005 to make our basketball courts have the same texel density as the players when seen up close, this was an issue because the shoe's are often filmed up close during replay cameras and the court surface looked like blurry shit because we wanted each court to have character and actually photographed and then used the exact staining and dirt patterns found at the real location. The court textures did not tile they were unwrapped 1:1 to allow for real world wear patterns captured on site. The game was accurate to about 2-3 feet. A great technique in my opinion, I'm looking forward to seeing how Half Life 3 tackles the issue of blurry textures seen up close, or if they even try to tackle it. Perhaps game reviewers and game players alike are not bothered by this issue any more as the diffuse textures have come up in resolution drastically over the last 5 years.

http://www.malcolm341.com/ruckerdlc35big.htm

http://www.malcolm341.com/ruckerdlc04big.htm

Computron

Halo Reach is still using them, and they go really high in tiling to crank out a ton of texel desity but they do some kind of distance fade to make them less noticably tileable from a distance. Is there any way to emulate this effect in UDK? DepthBiased Alpha perhaps?

malcolm

Yeah in Gears 1 they used detail normal maps on everything, so I would imagine it's in UDK somewhere. By definition detail maps fade based on distance from the camera, that is the whole point of them. You don't see them when you're far away to avoid noisy shit looking texture, when up close they fade in linearly. Generally it's a global scale, so you determine when they fade starts based on distance.

Vailias

The detail textures often just mip out after a certain distance anyway.
But with UDK its easy enough to just fade the detail in by getting camera distance from pixel and making that into a falloff range and threshold.

Computron

I don't think that mipping them out alone will look good will it? and could you not save on performance if you used a switch to turn off detail normals past a certain point. What Nodes should I use in UDK to make something like what I am describing?

passerby

Computron wrote: »

I don't think that mipping them out alone will look good will it? and could you not save on performance if you used a switch to turn off detail normals past a certain point. What Nodes should I use in UDK to make something like what I am describing?

it is pretty easy to remove or add things from the distance, just using the camera position node and comparing it to the world potion of the mesh, which can be done via a lerp to fade out the detail normal, but it wont save you any resources, since the material will still be using the detail normal texture sample, it just wont be visible on screen.

if you could find a way to trigger the state of a static switch paramater that bypasses the whole detail normal part of the network it could be done, but i find static switch parms tend to lag udk out for a sec when there state is changed, and i also dont know how you would trigger one to change state in the material network via distance, since im sure it is olny possible to change the state of a static switch parm, via kismet or uscript

malcolm

Mipping out detail maps looks bad, your diffuse texture will not look as intended.

Bruno Afonseca

you can do custom mips on it to make it fade out, I guess... But maybe it'd be better to make a lod material?

[HP]

fonfa wrote: »

you can do custom mips on it to make it fade out, I guess... But maybe it'd be better to make a lod material?

It's one possibility but more materials mean more drawcalls, and one extra material just to fade out on a detail map sounds like pushing it.
I'm not sure about UDK but CE3 does this automatically, you only start to see the detail NM when you're close to it.

Adam L. Gray

From my experience it's more or less the same in udk really. Stand back a few feet and the detail map will be completely washed out/invisible. So, I wouldn't worry about that.. If anything, then it'd only help the main material/shapes pick up the lighting better

Will Faucher

Would anyone have a visual example of the grayscale/multiply detail shader?

Adam L. Gray

http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/UDK_Asset_Position_Offsets_Texturet_Tutorial.html

Eric Chadwick

Also here's a video tut about making a detail normal mapping shader in ShaderFX.
http://www.lumonix.biz/Media/ShaderFX_DetailNormalMapping.wmv

Ghostscape

malcolm wrote: »

I totally expected to see detail maps of some kind in Crysis 2 and BF3, but there was none.

This is untrue, at least on PC. The most noticeable detail normal in BF3 is the tiling finish they have on all of the FP weapons - on some weapons it will visibly repeat when you are using iron-sights.

What you will find, however, is that detail normals are not tossed about on every environment texture, which is something that used to show up a lot more - they are not universally applying detail textures, but they are still using them often.

malcolm

I was referring to a unified system on the environments, I thought that was implied in my statement, sorry if it wasn't.

Yes you can clearly see detail textures on every single character in BF3, it's how they get that fancy high res cloth pattern on the soldier's cloths. I didn't really notice any on the environments in Crysis 2, Rage, and BF3 which I played all on the pc. If there were some here and there I still see a trend where they are not used at all, or used sparsely.

What I did notice on BF3 though was the cloths looked great because of the detail map, but for up close shots the faces looked blurry by comparison, I wonder if a light noise texture could be used to get some grain/skin pores on the faces without looking like shit to fix this texel density mismatch. Could be a cool experiment.