TechDemo Island preview images

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Carsten
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TechDemo Island preview images

Post by Carsten » 2006-04-20, 13:21

Hi all,

thanks to Dodger the great image galery works again, and so I just added a few shots of my latest walk-through:

http://images.ca3de-community.de/main.p ... itemId=319
and another one at
http://www.ca3d-engine.de/e107_images/n ... review.jpg

The images show my current results for
  • the heightmap (made with World-Machine, supported by Gimp, 1025*1025) and
  • the base diffuse map (made with Terragen, 1024*1024 pixels)
For our next walk-throuh, I'll still add brushes by Thrawn, sorry for having forgotten them for these pics. ;)

Any comments / suggestions so far?
Best regards,
Carsten
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Post by Kai » 2006-04-20, 13:54

Hmm nice ^^

Loks pretty good so far, im still thinking about more mountain shapes, but on the other hand, this looks quite like Farcry, without the dense vegetation (and some additional tricks, like vertikal aligned textures on steep geometry.

We need a better skybox ! the current one is not fitting, please use some of the great sky images levaravel provided.
The water still heavy "tiles", i see strong tiling patterns.

But so far the current map looks very promising ;)

Btw: The new Farcry sequel "Crysis" showed some new images, and i'm stunned by the massive details the draw.
Remember: This is Xbox 360 Hardware, so very high end hardware !

Pic1
Pic2
Pic3
Pic4
Pic5

Here is the full gallery
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Post by Carsten » 2006-04-20, 15:10

Hi Kai,
Kai wrote:We need a better skybox ! the current one is not fitting, please use some of the great sky images levaravel provided.
The water still heavy "tiles", i see strong tiling patterns.
Iirc, I never received skydome images from Levaravell (I need the six squares for a cube-map, but ttbomk he only provided me with a single big shot - which I cannot employ. Maybe Thrawn can help :idea: ?

You're right about the water, although the tiling can only be seen from high mountains. I hope that the same trick as with the terrains detail-maps will help...
But so far the current map looks very promising ;)
Thanks, it's good to know your opinion! ;) I have had some doubts here and there (e.g. could there be more noise in the texture? more wet sand near the shoreline?), but at least it's not a total disaster. Terragen is surprisingly difficult to control if you want to force the constraints of your mind onto it. ;)
Remember: This is Xbox 360 Hardware, so very high end hardware !

Pic1
Pic2
Pic3
Pic4
Pic5
Pretty impressive - SpeedTree and LoD techniques at their finest. (And everything is beautifully anti-aliased of course.) The last (fifth) shot looks especially well, although one can also see well the techniques that have been employed to create it.
Best regards,
Carsten
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Post by Thrawn » 2006-04-20, 15:42

Iirc, I never received skydome images from Levaravell (I need the six squares for a cube-map, but ttbomk he only provided me with a single big shot - which I cannot employ. Maybe Thrawn can help Idea ?
Well, I got 2 skyboxes from Levaravel, but only one weally works well. He creates them as skydomes and I port them to cubemaps. It looks awesome, but it isn't usable to my mind for the techdemo because the weather is too bad - in paradise, the sun shines ;)

Here is the skydome I'm talking about

Well, there are 3 things we can do:

1. We ask Levaravel to create a skybox with good weather
2. I create one like this in Terragen.
3. We wait fo the Terragen 2 open test, this program is just awesome and really creates photorealistic results. Looks like I'm a beta tester so I just have to wait for it's release to testers

----------

@ Terrain: Carsten, you really did a damn fine job, just looks awesome.
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Post by Kai » 2006-04-20, 16:33

Afaik Leva did these skyboxes with a 360° photo equipment. These are real skies, thats why they look pretty good ;) A would prefer such cubemaps, since terragen can do a well but not outstanding way of creating clouds (at the current version, 2.0 seems to be much better)

Anyway i just think that the current box is simply wrong placed ;)
Btw: it looks like we need some more vegetation stuff, grass, trees, trunks ,bushes etc.
So i started think about grass, one of the most important (most visible) elements.
Farcry uses 2 different blending modes, (normal and alphablend) is that already possible with Ca3D ?
Here are some examples i did today:
Image
Image

try them out, im not sure how well they look when massivly used.
I suggest to use lightmap based ambient, 2sided, noshadow and maybe you could add some slight bending, like wind is going through ;)
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Post by Thrawn » 2006-04-20, 16:42

Don't need to test them in order to say that they will be looking awesome ingame.

But I suggest to increase the contrast of the second one, it almost looks like it has a grey shade, this won't look good ingame.
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Post by Kai » 2006-04-20, 17:57

Hehe but thats for a good reason, i did those 2 different ways because i wanna know the result later. In Farcry the gras decals are quite desaturated and somewhat strange colored, more like my lower version, but i can not say for sure which version is better. The Farcry gras decal i inspected looked quite ugly with any 2d viewer, but very well within the engine ..

So i hope Carsten experiments with both version and maybe multiple rendermodes, just to get an idea what the result may look like.


Addition:
I wonder why there is a tile pattern on the water anyway ?
Water is just made of a plain color (tint) and small or big waves including reflection /refraction. Is the cause of those pattern a bump / reflection-displace texture ? Or do you use a diffuse texure on the water ?
If so, just drop it !

Addition 2nd:
Oh i found out that you really added a diffuse, please drop this ! there is no need for a diffuse, as this cause tiling when far away with the cam and distortion is less visible.
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Post by Carsten » 2006-04-20, 20:30

Kai wrote:Btw: it looks like we need some more vegetation stuff, grass, trees, trunks ,bushes etc.
Very right! I'll soon implement my SpeedTree-alike system too, and then some trunk and leaf textures will certainly be needed...
Farcry uses 2 different blending modes, (normal and alphablend) is that already possible with Ca3D ?
Of course it is, this is a simple technique available since the first days of OpenGL. ;)
Here are some examples i did today:
Wow! :wohow: They're awesome :!: :up:
I suggest to use lightmap based ambient, 2sided, noshadow and maybe you could add some slight bending, like wind is going through ;)
Yes, I think that I should use special-case code for grass for several reasons (LoD, rendering as you described above, and the proper color, see below).
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Carsten
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Post by Carsten » 2006-04-20, 20:31

Thrawn wrote:Don't need to test them in order to say that they will be looking awesome ingame.
Exactly my thought!
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Carsten
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Post by Carsten » 2006-04-20, 20:47

Kai wrote:In Farcry the gras decals are quite desaturated and somewhat strange colored, more like my lower version, but i can not say for sure which version is better. The Farcry gras decal i inspected looked quite ugly with any 2d viewer, but very well within the engine ..
I think I know why grass should look somewhat "gray": The key idea here is to have grass that is very very similar in color to the underlying base texture of the terrain. This is very important to create the impression that the terrain and the grass are in fact "one body". It is also very important to be able to fade out the grass in the distance without giving the impression that the terrain color changes.
Both is achieved by "lightmapping" the gras. That is, the color of the terrain where the root of the grass is is looked up, and then the entire gras brush is multiplied with that color. Therefore, Gras can and probably should even be black/white (grayscale) images!
Color variations are possible for certain effects (small blossoms), just as sometimes detail-maps have color when they in fact should be grayscale only.
So i hope Carsten experiments with both version and maybe multiple rendermodes, just to get an idea what the result may look like.
Sure as hell!! :cheesy:
Addition:
I wonder why there is a tile pattern on the water anyway ?
Water is just made of a plain color (tint) and small or big waves including reflection /refraction. Is the cause of those pattern a bump / reflection-displace texture ? Or do you use a diffuse texure on the water ?
If so, just drop it !
Yes, the water is a combination of a diffuse-map and two animated normal-maps, plus the skydome for reflection. The diffusemap is quite nice, but I'll try to "fix" it with the high-pass filter methods we discussed earlier. Also remember that the water is animted - which looks a lot better than the still screenshot anyway. But in any case you're right, I'll do my best to remove the tiling.
Addition 2nd:
Oh i found out that you really added a diffuse, please drop this ! there is no need for a diffuse, as this cause tiling when far away with the cam and distortion is less visible.
Well, but when looked at close up, I think dropping the diffuse looks worse... but no problem, I can experiment and then we'll compare the individual setups.
I would also like to make the water a little more translucent again, which helps to better present the Fresnel effect.
Best regards,
Carsten
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Post by Carsten » 2006-04-22, 21:51

Hi Kai!
Kai wrote:Addition 2nd:
Oh i found out that you really added a diffuse, please drop this ! there is no need for a diffuse, as this cause tiling when far away with the cam and distortion is less visible.
Mhhh. Try the following: Open the file "Materials/liquids.cmat", and find the Ocean water shader:

Code: Select all

TechDemo/Ocean1
{
    AmbientShader A_WaterCubeReflect
    LightShader   none      // == noDynLight (<-- not really!!)
    noDynLight

 // diffusemap  Textures/liquids/waterfall_diff.png
    diffusemap  Textures/liquids/water1a_diff.png

    [...]
}
Then replace the line

Code: Select all

    diffusemap  Textures/liquids/water1a_diff.png
by

Code: Select all

    diffusemap  Textures/generic/_magenta_diff.png
This demonstrates the effects of your suggestion (dropping the diffuse-map) very well, and imho, it looks a lot worse (ignoring the actual color), because
  • the pattern is not really gone (some of it is inherent to the normal maps, but because they're animated, that's not so bad), and
  • There is no animation effect (water movement) any more close to the player, e.g. when being at the beach and looking at ones feet.
I also have screenshots of this at my other PC, and will post them early next week, but for these reasons (especially the second), I'd prefer to stay with the water as-is for now... (?)
Best regards,
Carsten
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Post by Kai » 2006-04-23, 00:02

Well i already tried out some things with the shader.

There is no real "solution" at the current state. The problem is the lack of render to texture i think.
As for now i suggest using a very strong blurred version of the diffuse map, just for the color.
But later we should use a much more advanced approach for water.
In Farcry its something like this:
Image

The color tint seems to be simple fog, like it is visible below the water surface. Add this with fresnel based reflection (far distance) and refraction (close distance)
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Post by Carsten » 2006-04-23, 10:22

Kai wrote:But later we should use a much more advanced approach for water.
So be it! :)
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Carsten
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Post by Kai » 2006-04-24, 13:18

Tested some stuff and these are some small glitches !

- The watersurface pertubation texture size is to small, i suggest scaling the texture up about the factor 5, so its much bigger, and waves are not so tiny.

- The detailmap of the terrain is HUGE, i did a grass texture in replace for the old one but is far too big in scale.
I suggest to scale it down so it fits much better.
And the detailmap of the terrain is just an allaround detail map ?

Any chances i could scale this all by myself inside the shaders ?

Edit:
Found the param for the terrain detailtexture ^^

Im currently in the channel ! :)
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Post by Sindwiller » 2006-04-24, 19:25

Can i add that this image looks so awesome?! :D

Wfr, Sindwiller
Im Working on:
- Some Linux Bash-Scripts for installing stuff. Dont ask further questions, because i can't explain that more simple ^^
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