My enviornment thread

Sage

I played around modeling a landscape thing and baked a normal map for it in zbrush. I made the normal map at 2048 x 2048. It's nothing great just playing around at the moment. I was wondering if anyone has made normal maps for terrains made from displacement maps. What's a better way of doing this? do you unwarp each part of the terrain like you would a normal level or object? Let me know what you think.

Alex

ander

Well, the terrain itself is quite dull at the moment. A small bridge, castle or a monolith could add some flavor.

tokidokizenzen

Hi Sage
Don't have much exp. with normal maps on terrain such as this. Most of that stuff i've had dealings with was done by an in house terrain editor. One tip I can give is to add a guy or as ander mentioned a building or something in the scene to set the scale. Have it in the scene while you are working. I usually bring something like this in before I even start working.
Cheers!

Lee3dee

Hi sage,

Depending on what app your using Maya or max, i would take a plane with a bunch of divisions and use the deformer tool to raise and lower the landscape. Or maybe open up something like Unrealed and play with those terrain tools. good thing about unrealed is that you can export the terrain as obj.

nfrrtycmplx

In my experience working with terrain on various projects i've found the best results come from setting up a plane and using a displacement map on it... from there modeling in details and applying textures and normal maps from that point in the method of tiled textures. Also adding in some rock geometry in the form of instanced objects. using Unreal Terrain is good too... it's a bitch to get stuff to line up on it... i'd suggest the modeling in max method if you're just going to use it in a scene...

My favourite form of blending is using vertex alpha... it's relatively cheap and you get pretty good results... however if you're going to use it in some game engines, you'll need to copy channel 0 to another channel and use it as the mask... i've known vertex alpha to be a problem in a couple of rendering engines.

Modeling it in max and exporting it to unreal is an option too, you just have to chunk it out so that it can be occluded...

Good luck, let me know if you has any questions... I'll be more than happy to help.

Btw: the large normal map over the entire thing seems like a less than great idea... because if you're going to use it for anything in a game it's going to be real low res and you'll get a bunch of lighting artifacts... either that or you got a big ass normal map that you can't reuse anywhere.

Cheers,
Don

Emil Mujanovic

You're getting some real contradictory shapes in the mesh due to your normal map. There are soft bit which look really nice, then there are those hard edge bits which almost look like they are inverted polys from certain angles. The mesh itself looks very unnatural and very plain on its own.
In nfrrtycmplx's post, he mentioned some really nice techniques that are pretty much the same as mine and it works really well. It will keep your mesh cleaner and it allows you to use modular pieces for construction.
But overall, great job and hopefully see some more stuff.

-caseyjones

Xeto

Just doin a quick glance while I'm waiting for my laundry so forgive me if I missed something or am repeating a post. But it seems to me that you are using a normal map for the entire terrain?

Normal maps should be used for smaller detail on terrain rather than trying to emulate a hill. Doesn't read well.

The way I do it is height map. That's normal for any terrain in just about any engine. Then you texture the terrain using tiling textures (like in unreal ed)

This is the point you would use your normal maps. Not on the over all terrain but as an addition to a tiling texture to maybe make a texture of rocks seem 3D. Things like that.

A normal map streached over an entire area like that is only going to set up for problems when playing something that may look like a hill in the distance is just a flat plane.. then what does it look like when youre one it?

In short for my long ass message... make the terrain with a height map and then texture the crap out of it with tiling textures then use Normal maps as detail for those tiling textures.

Sage

thanks for all the feedback. I did a search for blending textures with vertex alpha but didn't find anything. Can anyone post some good vertex colors tutorials that deal with blending textures for environments?

This is supposed to be a garage. No textures just playing with lighting.







modeled mountain



Thanks for the help. Let me know what you think.

Alex