Terrain - How I Hate Terrain...

odium

Sup wiggas...

Me and a few of the guys from the team have been scratching our heads so much his past week at terrain... Now, the issue isn't so much we can' do it, the issue is we cant do it "NICE".

Many games have different ideas of terrain, vertex painting/blend maps, mega texture, hard geo modular modelling etc... But no matter what we try, we always come up a bit stumped.

I'll start with the basics, its for the OverDose engine and it supports everything I've just mentioned, mega texture, vertex painting, blend maps, modular modelling pieces etc, and OverDose is a per pixel lit game engine (meaning sadly that only two channels can be used at once for blending, then you split a surface). Foliage etc are also fully supported.

But the issue is less with the texturing, and more with the modelling... No matter what we seem to do, we can't seem to get a mesh that looks realistic... In fact, everything looks like jelly, like the terrain in Quake 3, or Mass Effect... Really poor.

Do you guys have any tips, tutorials or nice examples floating around we can take a peak at?

Heres a quick screengrab of some damn complex and took just under 2 seconds terrain:
http://www.teamblurgames.com/odium/od_terrain_meh.jpg
TIA.

pior

I dunno ... whenever I see great terrain in a game I almost always feel like it is thanks to great artistry, not thanks to great tech. Like on that screenshot below : reason why it looks so good is because the rock tiles are so big, and look great, I think ?

http://media.bestofmicro.com/7/U/219306/original/rage-siggraph-05-1249610194.jpg

odium

Mega texture there, but yeah I defo agree.

Noors

I'm struggling with terrain too atm.
i think you lack of resolution, on your mesh, and on your textures. The splatting mask is really blurry. I wonder btw, if some engines don't do some noise on splatting textures on the fly, to add precision. Also use decals to add some variety. I think u could play a bit with sandbox2 or unreal engine to see how it works there.
did u see that ?
http://ati.amd.com/developer/SIGGRAPH07/Chapter5-Andersson-Terrain_Rendering_in_Frostbite.pdf

funshark

well, if the issue is with modeling, the screen you've posted shows lack of polygons to define shapes and volumes.

Additionally, you need detail map, normal map ( and specular and so on with a good shader ), lightmap ( with a good light setup ) and variations ( like decals ) to bring an interesting atmosphere and to obtain a believable environment.

odium

Our engine supports mega texture... That pic was just an example of whats up atm, lol.

Noors

http://wiki.splashdamage.com/index.php/A_Simple_First_Megatexture
http://wiki.splashdamage.com/index.php/An_Advanced_Terrain_and_Megatexture
?
Also i'm totally not convinced by megatexture technology, but that's another problem.

Ark

Worldmachine is handy for this stuff. Export an heightmap and use it to push a flat subdivided plane. You can use the 'Displace' modifier in Max for this.

Then you can tweak the mesh with soft selection/paint deformation tools to pick out unique pieces.

This took literally 2 minutes to make:



From there, it start to pick out some bigger forms and tweak them to your liking.

I think you need alot of unique pieces to make the terrain stand out, as in the RAGE example.

JohnnyRaptor

theres been great environments way before most of the techniques you namedropped in your first post. As pior mentioned, good environments come from good artists and good planning and purpose.

Im no environment artist, but id guess a good artist besides the skills he got, would study the subject matter, in your case, some arctic environments before, trying to see what characterizes them. Right now your screenshot lacks most of those things.

Then i guess you would have to consider the purpose of the environment, why does your game need it? is it game play relevant? in that case, what are the visuals needed to support the gameplay mechanics? etc etc. Plan, concept out in either 2d or very rough 3d and then start doing it.

heres some reference, go!

http://www.digitaljournal.com/img/8/9/9/i/3/9/4/o/Paul_HubnerArcticLandscape.jpg
http://www.educapoles.org/pics/projects/arctic_arc/arctic_landscape_or.jpg
http://stevepd.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/ny_alesund_glacier_1.jpg
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/1377346.jpg
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/1377240.jpg
http://www.ii.uib.no/~petter/mountains/G4/NO3/209.jpg
http://lh6.ggpht.com/_ZQulLuLy_kM/RnQ0-h9zhiI/AAAAAAAAB2M/XNJmQLiC53A/65526_poster2000.jpg

odium

Thanks for the ref's, come in handy.

As for World Machine, yeah thats all well and good but christ it hurts my head trying to figure out how to get erosion maps working and such

The general jist of my workflow atm is that I have to make a high poly mesh in mudbox, but christ knows how Splash Damage got the detail they did in those mega textures...

EDIT: Its worth noting that this is just near terrain, and that there will be a modelled skybox with fast mountains and such to give more depth.

Heres where I'm at so far:

Mark Dygert

Agreed tech doesn't seem to be your problem right now...

How do I do terrain? One of 90 different ways.
Which is the best for us? Haven't got a clue. I don't know enough about what you want to do. I can suggest my personal favorite and what has been easiest for me but if what you're doing is drastically different than what I've worked on it won't help.

Camera placement and scope? FPS, RTS, Flight Sim?
What kind of system? iphone, ds, psp, last gen console, current consoles, low end PC's, high end PC's?
How important is the environment? Do you have 5,000 character models on the screen so the env needs to take a step down or is all you'll ever interact with the env?

odium

Good questions, sorry I never gave more info:

OverDose is a FPS, more demanding than Doom 3 to be honest as we have a LOT more fancy tech, soft shadowing, post processing, depth of field etc. That gives a little info into system spec, you wont be finding a Wii running this, so higher end Pc's. Environment is important as its a large area of the level, with levels being on the same scale as say Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Characters and such are high poly yes, with LOD, ranging from 8,000 ro 12,000 polygons each with normal, spec and diffuse. Indoor and outdoor areas are in each level, but of course we have methods of reducing overdraw with LOD, vis hinting etc.

Lamont

Tools like world machine would be a base mesh, then you go in and add your other structures that a terrain editor can't do. Like good looking rocks and cliffs.

MoP

World Machine ftw, put a bit of time into learning it and the results will be totally worth it. It basically gives you awesome flow maps and natural wear channels for free, which is priceless when megatexturing (you can see the signature erosion flow paths quite clearly in many Rage terrain shots).

It's not difficult to set up good Erosion node settings, then you simply output the mask images from that and use them in your textures (or megatexture if needs be - it's best used with that!).
SD wiki has tutorials on this, I'm sure you've seen them (and they're linked here).

As Pior says it will usually come down to great artistry rather than any specific tools. I've seen brilliant looking terrains done in all sorts of techniques - it's about time and effort, good use of reference and good quality modelling & texturing.

odium

MoP, I did try learning WM... It made my head fall off... Not saying which one...

Really gonna have to pick it back up and have another crack...

hijak

Well what worked for me last time i had to do terrain was to use a combination of techniques. You've mentioned using mix maps which works okay for smaller areas of terrain but poorly for large areas. What i ended up doing was creating a shader that mixes up to 9 texture sets (diff/spec/nrm) based on slope, and elevation. What became a limit was that the slope was subject to normal angle so lower poly geo would end up looking sorta strange could not get all the detail i wanted. So what i ended up doing is making a large normal map that covers the entire terrain so i could give the apperance of a highly sculpted terrain and was able to make the shader calculate the normal map into the slope amount. That way you get a really accurate, calculation of slope based off of the normal map. Then just have the detail map as well, so you end up with 9 different terrain materials mixed from slope and elevation, plus the detail normal map to keep it looking sharp.

a tip for creating such is that to mix the textures, have the normal angles run a gradient that controls the placement of each texture. So instead of a mix map your using, a gradient that makes the same color but based of a combo of the face normal, and surface normal read from the normal map. The elevation controls where to mix sets of 3 terrain materials.

The network was created in mental mill and exported to the needed format.
http://forum.mentalimages.com/showthread.php?t=1554&page=2
this thread contains most of the basic info on how the network was setup.

Ryno

Reference reference reference. Seriously. Just smacking together various maps with some blends randomly will leave you a mish mash of blah.

This may sound a little annoyingly new-agey, but really try to understand your terrain. Tell yourself a little story about what you're looking at. In your example, what is the ground underneath like? Is it soft rolling hills of rolling grassland where buffalo and deer might still try to graze, cutting tracks across the snow? Or is it craggy volcanic rock and moss where thermal heating might cause the snow to melt and refreeze.

Figure out other stuff. How cold is it? If it gets above freezing occasionally, there will be more snow on the north sides of the hills (northern hemisphere), and there will be grooves cut by runoff, and small creeeks in the gullys. If some of the hillsides are too steep, they won't hold snow. The snow will slide off and pile at the bottom, possibly exposing frozen mud or rocky cliff face.

Just figure out exactly what kind of terrain you have in mind, then look for similar reference. Then just pick and choose which elements you'd like to reproduce.

[iWi]

I enjoy work under EarthSculptor -
http://www.earthsculptor.com/



This is my last terrain (still wip) what I've made thinking about ETQW and his gameplay (objectives) . Planned for megatextures at terrain size 32 k.
&
That's what I'd like get at back side.
http://lh6.ggpht.com/_ZQulLuLy_kM/RnQ0-h9zhiI/AAAAAAAAB2M/XNJmQLiC53A/65526_poster2000.jpg
Nice ref JohnyRaptor, thanks.:poly142: