4 replies to this topic

[Quat]

I am wondering about modern techniques for texturing terrains. Has anyone tried tiling heightmaps (in addition to color maps) and doing parallax occlusion or hardware tessellation? I like the NVIDIA "Islands" demo, but they don't have a corresponding whitepaper for that demo.

[Tordin]

i dont see why one would use parallax occlussion on terrain. Terrain is essentialy just a grid of triangles. (and mostly grass or some kind of flat shape.

But Tesselation to make it more detaild with a shadersplatmap. in that way you can paint material and texture to your terrain, and shade it after that.
Like parallax occlusion, or any other cool stuff.

[Krohm]

Tordin, on 28 February 2012 - 04:35 AM, said:

i dont see why one would use parallax occlussion on terrain. Terrain is essentialy just a grid of triangles. (and mostly grass or some kind of flat shape.

That's exactly the reason for which one would like to do parallax on it. To make it look irregular without bombing geometry requirements.

I have no idea what you're referring as "flat shape".

There was a video involving triplanar texturing which apparently used parallax on terrain.
I think that was it: http://www.gamedev.n...normal-mapping/

[Hodgman]

You're probably interested in the QDM presentation: http://www.drobot.or...t%20Mapping.pdf

Specifically, the bit at the end on POM/QDM + height-blending.

[Tordin]

Krohm, on 29 February 2012 - 01:07 AM, said:

Tordin, on 28 February 2012 - 04:35 AM, said:

i dont see why one would use parallax occlussion on terrain. Terrain is essentialy just a grid of triangles. (and mostly grass or some kind of flat shape.

That's exactly the reason for which one would like to do parallax on it. To make it look irregular without bombing geometry requirements.

I have no idea what you're referring as "flat shape".

There was a video involving triplanar texturing which apparently used parallax on terrain.
I think that was it: http://www.gamedev.n...normal-mapping/

Flatshape = grass, dirt, mud, sand.
Nonflatshape = Stones,bricks and such.

The thing as i understood it is that having a paralax on stuff else then nonflatshapes is kinda waste of performance since you dont realy get what you want from that. for grass you make grass billboards.
but for bricks, this works realy well. (it works god danm well for bricks )

i belive more in tesselation to get a more smother/detailed curved terrain shape.
and THEN to add a shadersplatmap, to shade only bricks to paralax or what ever you would like.