Diablo 3 : Researchs and questions about how environments are textured.

Cremuss

Hi there,

My next handpainted project is going to be inspired by Diablo 3's environments and considering I've been a big fan of the desolate sands art since the I first discovered it, it's probably going to be something close to it

So I've been doing some tests and experiments, first focusing on finding a very productive workflow and optimizing a lot the texture and memory usage but I ran into a few questions that I couldn't answer. Since I'm not a pro in that kind of stuff, I figured out I would ask you guys your opinion on a few things technical questions that came to my mind while wandering the desolate sands. :poly141:

Of course I'm not necessarily asking you to answer all my questions but I would be grateful if you could give me some clues on a few of them

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Thanks a lot

Dataday

Gonna go out on a limb and say its probably something a bit closer to this or built off this approach. Could be entirely wrong though.

http://youtu.be/J8Ey8RCEUVo?t=33m10s

PyrZern

The technology they use shown in that link makes me wanna be level designer O o'

Cremuss

Thanks for the link. I can see vertex painting + masks/heightmaps working very well on a big single and dense terrain mesh like WoW but I hardly imagine it's the case in Diablo 3 since the map has to be random and everything. It seems more like floating geo's displayed on top of the ground with some kind of alpha blending.

For instance in 7, we can see borders are made of floating geometries and looking at the silhouette, it has clearly a very low tri count. However the sand (where I made a circle) is blending both on the ground mesh and border mesh so flawlessy, that I can't imagine it being done with vertex blending. I don't see how they could have matched the borders topology to the ground so that vertex painting looks that seamless, right ? It more look likes a giant decal displayed on top of the ground and border meshes... ?

SnowInChina

well, not everything in d3 is random generated
many keyareas are alsways the same

my guess is they have some unique decals to blend this special areas with the random generated areas, and for the random generated areas they use tileable stuff, which gets used over and over again to break it up

would be nice if someone who worked on this could give us some insight on how it was done

kurt_hectic

I had the same thoughts related to Dota's 2 terrain. Sometimes it looks like 15 decals combined: