Tire treads on Terrain

defragger

Hi,

I need your help!
Does anyone know how to make good tire treads on terrain like on the pictures below. They don´t need to be dynamic. I would like to build some directly into the terrain on soft muddy areas.
I´m using a polygon hand-modeled Terrain and a Splashmap for texturing. But i suppose the tire treads are not done via splashmap. Otherwise they would only go in a straight line because textures on the splash cannot be rotated.

Maybe a decal texture? But how can that be reused on different spots?

Please let me know how it is done, or if you have any ideas! That would be amazing!

kurt_hectic

That's not a good example imo.

What was the name of game where you had a whole fleet of trucks and had to collect wood from the forest ect.? They had the best mud ever ;]


SPINTIRES
http://store.steampowered.com/app/263280/

Got it. They have dynamic tessellation on the terrain, that's probably best solution so far.

Jonny10

In Unreal Engine you could use splines in combination with a plane for that. You can see it action here: [ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlgvfEicdwU[/ame]

If you want to do it with tessellation you'd have to work with your terrain material.

defragger

yeah that looks really amazing.

I did some research and I think it would be possible to cut the track out from the terrain and give it a straight UV mapping. UV stretching could be an issue. But then it would be possible to paint some small treads directly onto the track via splashmap. Large tread could be done with deferred decals.

The dynamic tessellation looks really awesome but it might be to intense. I´m working on a fast paced racing game. So that might be a little bit overkill ...! Does anyone know how that works from a technical point of view?

Eric Chadwick

I think you mean splatmap, not splashmap.

Tessellation like that is done dynamically at runtime, using a regular terrain grid (and regular grid UVs), but the tessellation is decreased with distance so you get decent performance. They write into a dynamic displacement map, using the tires as brushes. Looks like they're also using decals, for the minor dirt scuffing.

A wireframe
Hardware tessellation and steep parallax mapping

A few more
SEGA Rally GC screens

Obscura

Depending on the needed depth you can use spline mesh with parallax in UE4. It would be a lot cheaper than tessellation and its easy to set up. But if you want deep treads, then maybe yeah, use tessellation.