8 réponses à ce sujet

[Lord Methrid]

I'm looking for some help in making this canyon feel more natural.

What I really would like is for some advice on keeping this drastic drop but fixing the stretching texture. Tesselating and texture smoothing is not enough for this elastic situation and I fear I tesselated too much already.

Any help you guys can provide would be highly appreciated!



BryanDerksen, please help!

Something like close to this would be awesome!

Modifié par Lord Methrid, 17 juillet 2012 - 12:37 .

[DarthParametric]

I don't think you can do anything about it natively in the toolset because of the way the terrain tools work. The only way to do it properly that I can see would be to import a terrain mesh generated outside the toolset, which was something that people hoped might be possible with the promised plugin functionality that never eventuated. With that not being an option, I guess your best bet might be to try a workaround by modelling that section externally and somehow trying to blend it into the terrain. You'd have a hell of a time making it seamless though. I can't see any alternative beyond trying to hide the join with other models like rocks/boulders, walls/fences, trees/shrubs, etc.

[Lord Methrid]

I figured as much. But all is not lost, I found that doing layers along the cliffsides actually helps keep the texture relatively connected. The only drawback for me now is that I have to redo that entire side of the deformed cliff since there is no "de-tesselate" tool

Thanks though!

[sea-]

BioWare do have some fairly "extreme" geometry in a few places and I'm not sure how they actually got it. I would imagine with the tessellation tool and texture smoothing you could get something close to what you want - you'd need a more gradual slope and a slightly wider cliff. Props could be used to cover up problem areas, like rocks and vines.

Even games like NWN2 had this issue with a few pieces of terrain, so I imagine it's just a limitation of the engine and the tools.

[Lord Methrid]

Better? Yes? No?



One of the biggest challenges so far is the textures. Because the land mass is so expansive, even the largest desert like texture will show itself in a repeated pattern, thankfully this entire level is for a cutscene and I don't have plans on doing any close ups on those repeated textured areas.

Modifié par Lord Methrid, 31 juillet 2012 - 12:02 .

[DarthParametric]

Yeah not bad. You still have some fairly nasty distortion on the near-vertical areas, but that is unavoidable with that type of terrain generation.

As to tiling textures, there's not much you can do about that. Any tiling texture will be noticeable at some scale. The larger the texture, the further away you can get before it becomes distracting. The best you can do is try and break things up with rocks, shrubbery, props, etc. and attempt to focus the player's eye elsewhere. If you have large open areas of featureless terrain, the tiling is going to be very apparent.

[sea-]

Big improvement! Since you're using this for a cutscene, with the right camera angles you should be able to hide the tiles - for instance, shoot the cliff from the side, or above, and use cuts rather than pans and sweeps to avoid anything nasty showing up.

Tiling is a real problem, more so than with some game SDKs I find. For reference, take a look at BioWare's own maps. They go to great pains to avoid tiling, mostly by blending many textures together, or creating more complex terrain geometry to hide repeating patterns. They also tend to set up texture UVs on the small side - I use higher numbers because it makes textures look sharper, but this makes tiling more apparent.

My recommendation above all else is to get multiple textures that look similar to each other and use them to complement each other. If blended properly, it can actually be very hard to tell where one texture ends and another begins, and surfaces will look more natural. Try thinking textures less as terrain types and more as paints - you can still have a desert that looks like a desert without just having one cliff type, one sand type, etc. There are multiple smoothing grades on the texture brush, so make use of them to achieve more subtle effects.

Take a look at this example here, from the Dalish camp level:



Note how they use the trees to break up space, as well as the lack of plateaus and other flat spaces - you'll find most of the cliffs in Dragon Age are very bumpy and uneven, and this is to help hide tiling. Additionally, there are three textures being used there, but it looks like more because the transitions are well hidden and it's rare to see just a single texture in one spot. While you can sort of pick out the tiling if you look for it, in-game no player is really going to notice.

Modifié par sea-, 31 juillet 2012 - 05:54 .

[Lord Methrid]

I've taken all your thoughts and applied it to my work. It turned out better than before, thanks guys Screenshots can be seen in my project page:
Galaxia

I'll post more screens about the cliff later

Modifié par Lord Methrid, 06 août 2012 - 01:23 .

[sea-]

Some of that terrain of yours looks quite nice. Good work.