Affordable Landscapes 2

[Maximum-Dev]

Hey guys,

Here's a small preview of the third landscape. Enjoy







What's New? - 003

Function - Displacement Fade

Have you ever noticed, if you do a distance based tessellation, there are some small cracks happening at the transition and beyond? The more you amplify the displacement the more the cracks show. It's because of the fact that from the transition where the tessellations stops there wouldn't be enough triangles to cover the displacement, and hence it causes some cracks. What the Displacement Fade Function does is it smoothly fades out the displacement a little before the tessellation is faded out, preventing any displacement happening on areas outside the tessellated radius from the player. Again, just like the distance based tessellation function the fade out distances are customizable to fit the user preference.


Lastly, we had a little fun moment internally, worth sharing haha!

[SE_JonF]

Looking good. I'd love to see some more winter environments, especially with the tessellation for the snow and rocks. =)

[stucki]

this looks pretty pretty cool !!

may i ask if these improvements will be added to your first pack sometime ?

kind regards
stucki

[Maximum-Dev]

[MENTION=544]SE_JonF[/MENTION], Ah yes.... that should look nice! on the to-do list! Thanks man!

[MENTION=27931]stucki[/MENTION], To some extent, yes. But we should keep a distinct difference between the two, hence, we can't copy everything we do for AL2 to AL1 as well. Thanks for the kind words!



What's New? - 004

Function - Distance Fade

When a texture is tiled a lot on a landscape, usually the landscape surface starts to look too repetitive. An old Chinese proverb says: "Tile it less at far distances". What the Distance Fade Function does is it let's you choose the distance and falloff in which the less tiled texture starts to appears. Note that the tiling amount of near and far can be adjusted using the landscape's material instance. (Arid Mountains from AL1).


Without Distance Fade Function





With Distance Fade Function

[Maximum-Dev]

Landscape 03 is almost done












To-do:

Small stones
Some touch to the sky
Lava pool
Maybe Some lava particles and smokes and a new lava mesh

[Maximum-Dev]

Finished some small dark stones for procedural distribution on the landscape layers.

[Chosker]

[MENTION=13257]Maximum-Dev[/MENTION] all very good updates, looking good!

personally I dislike the use of 'distance fade' when the use is to make the textures less tiled. for me it breaks the sense of scale in the distance (things don't appear to be so big if the details are no longer small on the screen), and the fading effect is kinda off-putting
I'd recommend other methods to avoid the obvious texture tiling repetitions

[Maximum-Dev]

[MENTION=13257]Maximum-Dev[/MENTION] all very good updates, looking good!

personally I dislike the use of 'distance fade' when the use is to make the textures less tiled. for me it breaks the sense of scale in the distance (things don't appear to be so big if the details are no longer small on the screen), and the fading effect is kinda off-putting
I'd recommend other methods to avoid the obvious texture tiling repetitions

Yes I agree when there aren't many meshes on the screen to give you a sense of scale, if textures are looking very big at distance then everything feels smaller. However, I think a healthy amount of it can help.
I looked into the old way of rotating the same textures and mix it using a mask to break the tiling but it seems as the normal map gets rotated the light receiving direction doesn't look correct anymore. I'm going to look more as I go and see what other ways I can find. If you know of some effective ways of doing it, I'd be happy to hear it.

Thanks you!

[Chosker]

yeah rotated normalmaps don't work well. there's a way to fix them (though I only managed at 90 degree intervals) but it's expensive and not worth it in such cases IMO (only worth when you're using triplanar mapping)
im also not a fan of texture bombing or other exotic methods. they either produce not so good blending, hurt the texel density, or cause a performance overhead. I still think a more classic approach can produce good results and not cause performance overhead or visual artifacts, it just takes more work.

to avoid the tiling patterns I first and most importantly try to reduce visible patterns in the actual textures as much as possible (most importantly the ColorMap/diffuse). otherwise any method applied on top needs to be very aggressive which implies a tradeoff.
on top of that then I try to use more subtle methods: not only the usual global colormap that's mapped 1:1 to the entire landscape, but also a medium-scale detailmap (something still tiled)
here's a somewhat old wip picture of my landscape. I never really used proper ground textures so you can still see some of the grass tiling pattern (middle-left side of the picture) but in general the mid-distance tiling repetition is broken by this additional mid-scale detail texture

in your case the tiling pattern seems to come from the Normalmap though. might be worth trying to reduce the normalmap intensity over the distance. if your ColorMap has no obvious repeating patterns it might do the trick.

[Maximum-Dev]

@<a href="https://forums.unrealengine.com/member.php?u=540" target="_blank">Chosker</a>, Thanks for the tips mate!



Baby lava pool WIP





What's New? - 005

Function - Moving Dust

Do you wish a little more dynamic landscape? what about some dust moving on the ground? Moving Dust Function does just that! It's easily put into any landscape shader and adds the moving dust on the top. It could also be used as moving snow on the ground (like when there's some heavy wind going on). You get to customize it and change things such as scale, speed, color, opacity, normal influence, etc. Without spending more time talking, let's see it in action on AL2's Landscape 01!

https://youtu.be/QGpfvZeLgi0

[SE_JonF]

Very cool! Reminds me of Sullust from Battlefront. I'd love to see smoke and lava particles. Even some plateau like rocks as seen in this photo. Are these the sort of lava particles you had in mind?

The dust effect is also cool, looking forward to seeing how that looks in a snow map. =)

[OptimisticMonkey]

Looks awesome! When will it be in Marketplace?

_throws money at maximum-dev_

[Maximum-Dev]

Very cool! Reminds me of Sullust from Battlefront. I'd love to see smoke and lava particles. Even some plateau like rocks as seen in this photo. Are these the sort of lava particles you had in mind?

The dust effect is also cool, looking forward to seeing how that looks in a snow map. =)

! Battlefront looks so good... I feel useless when I look at their work... haha
Yeah I think some smoke and lava particles like that should be adding a lot to the atmosphere. I'm on the case.
Thank you.

[MENTION=11900]OptimisticMonkey[/MENTION], I'm not sure... soon I guess.

_monies fell into lava_

[Monsterlutz]

Amazong work... how is the performance?

[Maximum-Dev]

Amazong work... how is the performance?

I'm getting ~80 fps with all tiles loaded at once (64 tiles). If people use tile streaming so the lods will show at far and it switch to actual tile as you approach it it'd be locked at 120 FPS.