posted 12-26- 06:14 AM               

Last night I got to fly down the Volga River OK don't start leaping.. LOL it only has a very simple texture that I used for the displacement map to make the terrain form...

OK, here's what I did, the Q's will follow, but alot of you will know what they will be after reading this part..

in Max I made a Quad Patch, 40x40 miles in size.

I then used Displacement, and used a basic b/w texture of the area I'd created to use as a displacement map, black for low (river) white/grey for land, hills.

after that I converted it to an editble mesh, and in vertex mode I selected all the points that were now pushed down by the displacement map, and pulled them much further down, then click on Make Planer, and it flattend them.. then pulled them all back up again to the right level (approx) for the river.. this now gives a flat river with smooth banks

The I optimised the tile, until I had a good compromise between land detail and poly count.

Next it was TMapped with the texture I'd used to displace it with.

Now selecting the river vertextes I detached them as a seperate object, and exported everything as an object

OK, into OPS.

Open a terrain SM and delete all but 2 tiles, one water, and 1 land. now in the land tile, import the land part of the terrain, and in the water import the river.
copy the river tile and delete it, then paste it onto the land tile as a child, this way they are positioned right and move together for placement adjustments.

Change the texture refs to reflect the single texture, push the LOD switchin real high, and the texture distance aswell, and jump into SDOE.. then flt down the river

OK, all that was really very simple.. now the problem parts.. I know there may not be a good answer to them..but hey, we've learnt alot thats why i didn't search the forum, I want "uptodate" answers

1. Texture size. OK obviously using a 512x512 terrain texture isn't an option, it looks shitty.. So, if I use a full sized texture of 5120x5120 I'm sure SDOE will resize it.. but, does this mean you will see jagged edges on the texture (like when you zoom right in on a small texture, a straight line becomes a jagged line)

2. If I set the texture size to the actual size of the texture will this help?

3. Blurry textures: right now the texture looks blurred, is this simply a question of setting the distance right in OPS for the texture?

Guys, everyone, if we can sort out these 2 problems it's a very big breakthrough, I'm only 2 tiles, a poly count of only 745! the terrain right now is in now way at all a FR killer, infact it's very good.. but I need this texture problem solving or else it's back to the blackboard, and probably a much more complicated and drawn out job.

Thanks for any help guys, please rack your brains with this one.

~Nat~

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7./JG3 "Naturlich"


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posted 12-27- 04:57 PM               

The smaller the size of the texture, the more the card has to use filtering and antialiasing to keep the texture from appearing jagged. This is why the terrain in all flight sims looks blurred to a certain degree when you get close. The more pixels in your texture, the easier it is for the video card to filter it without as much blurring. The only way you can have absolutely no filtering occur is, when the number of pixels on the texture that are visible at any one time matches your screen resolution. You can see that on a 40 mile square terrain, this isn't going to happen when you're close to the ground without a HUGE texture (several million by several million pixels). This is also why ground textures also look much crisper at several thousand feet-0 more of the texture pixels are now visible in the screen area.

There is a trade off with larger textures. You can actually pickup frame rates on a machine with good memory and texture bandwidth by increasing the texture size. This happens because the card had to work overtime applying filtering to the small texture.

You do hit a limit when the texture size exceeds your memory bandwidth, then data transfer becomes the limiting factor.

Watch your frame rates at altitude and close to the ground. I usually drop a little, even when all of the same objects are visible. I actually see fewer ground polys, but my card is having to do more work filtering the texture.

If you want to see real jaggies, turn off all filtering (bi-linear, tri-linear, anistropic). Then you can play with different texture sizes and see how it looks.

One more note, it sounds like filtering and anti-aliasing are the same thing. They are and they aren't. Filtering anti-aliases the texture applied to an object BEFORE it is rendered. Anti-aliasing is a POST process filter on a video card that is applies after the entire screen has been rendered.

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"Where'd he GO!?!?"
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That answered my question

posted 12-27- 08:54 PM               

quote:

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1. Texture size. OK obviously using a 512x512 terrain texture isn't an option, it looks shitty.. So, if I use a full sized texture of 5120x5120 I'm sure SDOE will resize it.. but, does this mean you will see jagged edges on the texture (like when you zoom right in on a small texture, a straight line becomes a jagged line)

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It means it will be VERY blurry! Just as if you dithered your 5120x5120 texture down to 256x256 yourself in photoshop.

quote:

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2. If I set the texture size to the actual size of the texture will this help?

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OpenPlane only supports a max of 256x256 textures right now. Using higher numbers will not do anything.

quote:

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3. Blurry textures: right now the texture looks blurred, is this simply a question of setting the distance right in OPS for the texture?

---

It is blurry because (from what I gather) you are applying a 256x256 texture to a
40x40 mile terrain!

OpenPlane does not break the terrain into tiles just to annoy us, although it does that well, rather it does this to meet the 256x256 max texture spec and still show high detail over a wide area. Also I think this aids in blurring the far textures and also opens up the ability to LOD the terrain as well- maybe more.

OpenPlane is built around a tiled terrain. However, you may be able to get somewhere by creating a large LOD and texure mapping it with a high repeat, like most sims. I don't know for sure that OpenPlane supports repeating textures, but I bet it does - I think Gecko did this with success.

What we need is what Inertia has, a dicer that takes our big terrain model and chops it up for SDOE. They use such a tool that works with Multigen-Creator. We need a tool that works with 3dsmax/AC3D.

I am learning how to create plugins for AC3D, but right now such a project is beyond my abilies. It seems to me it would need to:

1. Dice the mesh into tiles, adding vertecies wherever a dice line intersects a poly of the mesh. It would need to create a new object for each tile that is made of a mesh and a positioning matrix. Also it should be named correctly.

2. The new mesh tiles would need to have their texture coordinates updated. New verts need to be interpolated between the existing verts. Next the UV coords need to be updated to match the corasponding texture tile. The upper left hand would always be 0,0 and the lower right would be 1,1 I think. All verts in between would need the correct values calculated based on where they are located.

3. Dice your big supertexture as we do now.

4. Now you can do plan A or plan B:

A: Export each mesh tile as an OL LOD over an existing SMD'd terrain. Batch update the terrain.ol file to use the correct file references and supertexture path. Rebuild the new terrain.sm file.

B: Output a correct binary SM file from the new LOD and texture data. This would be like a modified version of Hippie's OLC tool that read the 3dsmax or ac3d file to uncover the LOD mesh data, positioning matrix stuff, and file paths, etc.

I wish I could program...

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-Sv =FC=

WWI in SDOE!