Hi, My game programming background has mainly been DirectX 7 hardware, so no shaders at all. The way that I used to handle terrain was to basically duplicate the terrain and apply a different texture. Then I would use vertex alpha to blend all of these layers together. But seeing as I am now creating a totally shader orientated project - how is terrain blending done? Is there a way that requires only one "layer" of terrain? I had a look at splatting and the article was written in 2002, is this technique still largely used? Any advice helpful! Thanks, - aCiD2

The way I am doing this is simply using vertex color (i.e. rgba) values as weights given to four different texture maps in the pixel shader.

So for each pixel do four texture lookups, multiply each one by a component of the color, and then sum these. I thought that four texture lookups might kill framerate (especialy where only one texture is getting applied this technique is very wasteful) but so far it seems fine.

If you needed more than for textures per patch of terrian you could always add more per vertex attributes etc.

The only thing to be careful of is to make sure that the sum of all the color components i.e. r + g + b + a = 1.0 or else you will get saturated areas.

Of course with the technique I just said you are wasting te alpha chanel (though you don't really need it) I just use color for simplicity, when in reality any per vertex attribute is fine.

Peace,
Rob

edit: if you want to look at screenies of my currently VERY simplified terrain (made as a project for my job...soon to become a kick ass demo when I get my sky sorted...) check out http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/~rwhall/terrain.html

As you can see from the wireframe I am not doing any form of LOD at the moment, and only three materials (snow, grass, stone) is used.

Wow, munkuh your technique sounds awesome! Mind if I implant it in mine, that sounds really nifty - and best of all, simple :)

Texture splatting (or some form of it) is the most common method I've seen.

Quote:Original post by d000hg
Looks nice. It's the first time I've heard of a fully shader-based solution as well. Sounds reasonable although does it mean your entire map is limited to 4 different ground types? I guess using the specualr component you could get up to 8 (or have a custom vertex format) but you really want to have up to maybe 3 textures for any given vertex, out of a set of maybe 30 ground types. I've yet to see a decent implementation of this, certaily not making use of shaders in a clever way... I have each vertex using one ground type and these are blended between vertices.

The only limit to the number of ground types that can be applied this way are:

- number of allowed per-vertex attributes (most of which are 4-component vectors, so you have plenty of space there)

and

- number of texture reads you are doing per pixel (don't want this to get too high, or else you probably kill framerate, however ps3.0 (conditionals in pixel shaders) should negate this when it becomes mainstream).

If you divide your terrain into patches, then you can change the textures you use on a patch-wise basis...you probably wont want much more than 3 or 4 textures per patch anyway, since terrain is usually fairly homogenous over short distances, but theres no limit to the number of materials used over the entire terrain...

To get volume texture slabs working with mip-maps, you need to use more than a single pixel slab per terrain layer.

For instance, if you have 256x256 textures with 4 different layers, and you want 4 levels of mipmaps, you make the top 3d texture layer

256x256x32.

then, the lower mip-levels become :

128x128x16
64x64x8
32x32x4

Each slice in the top layer is 8 pixels high, and your texture coordinate should sample from the middle of each slice. That way, as you drop miplevels, you are still grabbing from only that one layer.

I know of at least one commercial game that uses my idea for this successfully.