Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Brute Terrain texture splatting

After getting texture splatting working I'm seriously re-thinking implementing my "Brute force chunk NO-LOD terrain." I was in such a rush to do it that I didn't really think about it.

Using nebula's fixed function render path, I need a pass for each detail texture plus an additional pass for the base texture and the performance is not too bad with 3 detail textures and a base texture. Since I was developing using the fixed function render path, it didn't occur to me that on shader model 2.0 hardware, I only need 1 pass to blend all my detail textures (4 so far) plus my base texture. Since the whole idea was to improve the look of distant geometry it really doesn't make sense anymore (see below). Plus I can use a single image to store alpha maps for 4 detail textures in each of its 4 channels.

About my splatting implementation; Initially, I wanted to blend the base texture based on the camera's distance from the particular point being rendered. As a first step to that, I tried a fixed blend value of 0.5 which looked really good. I then used the camera's distance method and distant geometry didn't look as good as with a fixed value. So I decided to go with the fixed value version.

See for yourself





I'm pretty happy with the results but any criticism/comments are welcome

2 comments:

Maximiliano G. said...

amazing.. good work.
use Nebula-Mangalore?..

I hope some day be able to do

i can do with Ogre.. but don't like Ogre, Many commands.

Larry said...

Thanks,

Yes, Its using Nebula2/Mangalore

I'm also not a great fan of Ogre, its an excellent graphics engine but I think it takes a large team to do an entire game project.