Improving 3D terrain quality - Object space and bent normal maps?

Jazon99

Hi guys!

I am thinking about how to improve the quality of my 3D terrains. I am using standard tangent space normal maps, but lately I have been reading about object space normal maps and bent normal maps. I don't know if they are a good option and used for static landscape meshes. I mean, mesh is static, although for object space normals, the height of the terrain can change if I make some adjustments. Are they used in industry by pros?

Thank you!

gnoop

I never see a baker that would bake  object space bent normals.     But assume it's still possible to do as post editing  with   2d compositor probably  or with node based  shader system  bending object space normals. 

  I never tried this although .    Baking  soft usually do tangent space bent  normal maps  as far as i know.    An advantage of object space  normal map is you don't  need  to bake it hi to low .  Sort of easy to do.   Just by simple surface shader bake.   Never a ray miss or seams issues .  Took slightly less calculations in real time my guess if it's  rather world space   ( terrain  aligned to word axis ).

   As of bent  normal map    for terrain   I am not sure  it worth it.    Bent normals basically  make texels reflect other part of environment  .   Less sky , more  ground  or whatever  bent normals are looking too.    For screen space reflections  it might be not so  much of a difference  until your ground surface is ice ( reflective/polished) . Could look better with ray tracing probably.      It also makes highlight spots appear  in weird place sometimes .       IMO you still need usual AO texture and  could just make things more rough  in cavities.        

But it's not from experience . I did  use world space normals   as unique macro  layer  for a terrain  but never bent ones.

Noors

Object (or World Space) normal map completely overrides mesh normals.
Mesh normals are simply not used in the shader, the normal vectors are straight from the normal map (which is slightly faster for the lighting calculation than tangent space).
They won't work if you need to deform a mesh as they would need to be rebaked.
As for bent normals maps, it might be useless for a terrain as you usually dont have much concave/convex geo that would benefit from AO tweaks, but why not.