[SOLVED] Massive amount of mask files - reduction?

[Guest shane.ploenges]

Hi, as i have stated before in nummerous posts, we are working with large datasets of many terrrain tiles.

A current project uses 260 or so terrain tiles of 8193 x 8193.

 

We managed to cut down the amount of data significantly by only having coarse diffuse and normal maps, but not generating any surface patches.

However we now have a case where we have over 260,000 mask files at 32 pixels by 32 pixels. Is there a way we can reduce the amount of all these files? it is a nightmare for SVN!

We Dont care so much about the dataset size, it is the amount of files that is a problem.

Can we make these patches/files bigger somehow when they are imported to cut down the number of files?

is there any way to use just one coarse file instead of all the patches like we have done with the diffuse and normal maps?

 

Thanks in advance

Shane

[ulf.schroeter]

Can you give some more information how these small masks (32x32) are used ? Which objects use these masks, what is exactlmasked ? Sounds like some sort of mask atlas would be solution by packing small makes into larger one, but understanding of use-case and usage pattern would be helpful for brainstorming.

[Guest shane.ploenges]

Hi Ulf - these are the Terrain Detail material mask files, sorry i did not make it clear.

[frustum]

You can delete all terrain patch masks. Surface patches will use coarse textures in that case.

[Guest shane.ploenges]

So frustrum, would this be the work flow?

Import all masks as normal.

Go in to the folder contating all the patch /.dds files and delete them all

 

is it as simple as that?

[frustum]

If you don't use detail materials just load coarse diffuse and normal textures for the whole terrain. Don't generate any patch textures in that case. If you need detail materials we can add a single per-terrain coarse mask texture for the up to four detail textures.

[Guest shane.ploenges]

Yes, we actually do use detail materials- a single coarse mask would be ideal for Large World handling.

[frustum]

Per-terrain coarse mask texture will be available in the following SDK.

[Guest shane.ploenges]

Thankyou vey much

[Guest shane.ploenges]

It seems that using Coarse mask textures makes detail painting with the terrain edit brush unavailable? Is this a limitation or a bug? It is certainly a requirement that we retain this ability to manually edit and paint detail textures.

 

There seems to be no error, however the textures just do not appear when you set the brush to Detail + Mask, select a Detail material and try to so some painting.

[frustum]

The painting is working only on surface terrain level because of performance. You have to generate per surface textures to perform painting operations. After that you can export coarse textures, assign it and remove all per surface textures.

[Guest shane.ploenges]

Thankyou for the quick answer frustrum - we will change the way we work as suggested.