Terrain - How I Hate Terrain...
polycounter lvl 18
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.
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.
Replies
http://media.bestofmicro.com/7/U/219306/original/rage-siggraph-05-1249610194.jpg
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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:
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?
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.
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.
Really gonna have to pick it back up and have another crack...
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.
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.
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: