[SOLVED] Clutter, grass etc Scaling

[werner.poetzelberger]

Hello,

 

just an idea while looking at the valley benchmark.

When moving quickly with the camera, the fading of the detail objects like the foliage and grass etc. seems to pop up (it is actually fading).

 

I saw this effect long ago in BF2 and it was quite effective, as the grass on the landscape did not fade to appaer, but it was scaled up from the ground.

 

Sure, there need to be some clever combination of techniques, but it still looks odd, when you recognize the border of low detail terrain and near detail with all the nice objects.

 

Cheers.

werner

 

[manguste]

Werner,

 

OK, thank you for your feedback. I'll pass this to our tech artists, but for now we found that such LOD distance is the best quality-quantity compromise for now. That is, though the number of objects is HUGE, Valley still runs on middle level graphics cards, not only top end ones. Anyway, when we are going to release an updated version of it (someday we will, I'm sure), we'll probably opimize it.

 

That was about the foliage and grass. As for the terrain, did not notice that. Where did you see it?

[werner.poetzelberger]

Hi,

 

as I was reading my post, I think I did not make myself very clear. (My English sometimes makes me wonder too ;) ).

 

It was not a critic on the demo itself, as I find the valley demo really amazing.

 

I was thinking of, if it would make sense to have scaling objects off the ground in the distance, together with fading them.

This would look like, the grass is coming up from the ground or the plants would grow.

(A bit like the beautiful morphing of the terrein, to make it more organic. Jumping Terrain levels also do look like very odd).

 

Together with a fade, this maybe could give a smoother transition.?

 

But the visual moving border effect is amplified by the fact, that there is bare earth and suddenly there is grass, adding the detail, but also changing colours.

If the bare earth would have the same look as the grass covered areas, the moving borders would also not be that visible.

In a sense the detail objects which are covering the ground would be needed as flat textures or overlays to form a kind of LOD of the actual details, lying over the bare earth, terrain textures.

Basically a 2D 'image' of all the objects, in a sense a bit like the low resolution Diffuse Texture of the terrein, which then blends into the higher res textures.

I dont know if this would work, rendering all the detail objects into an additional texture (or maybe into the Diffuse texture).

Eg. if I would paint flat grass texture, which also grass will grow as 'grass', the visual appearance of this part of land is a mixture of the terrain and the grass objects.

 

This visualresult should also been seen in the same area further away, but without the actual grass objects.

This also could work with small stones or stuff which is not vey high growing.

 

Just loud thinking, maybe this is total stupid.  :unsure:

 

(Still wired English, sry.)

 

re. Valley: there is one scene, where the camera is flying quite high over the valley, turning to the left and then going down between some bare trunks.

Actually the objects are not popping up, but the camera is that fast, that the appearance of the objects on the bare earth is very quick.

A bit more obvious is the shadow area which is has a very hard border, moving in with the camera. This is distracting the viewer, to look at that moving artifacts.

 

 

Cheers.

Werner

[manguste]

Werner,

 

Ok, that is more clear, but in the near future, at least, we'll stick to the current implementation. Again, thank you for your input.

[ulf.schroeter]

+1 (even better +10)

Already suggested for a long time and deadly required for all use-cases were the player is only a little bit above the ground. For such applications e.g. flight simulation or fast driving simulation current implementation is simply unuseable which is quite a shame for this high-end engine.

 

Unfortunately other engines provide much better long-range shadows. Also the rectangular layout of the shadow cascades is quite distracting when player moves to some higher viewpoint (see sceenshot in refered thread)

 

Edit:

 

Ah, just found another old thread on this topic.... 
 

[werner.poetzelberger]

Should'nt be that hard to implement I guess?

 

In a sense, these things are distracting from the beauty.

The eye always 'jumps' to the unregularities first.

Often that is really annoying if 99% are fine but 1% isnt. People most of the time judge it by the failing 1%.

 

Visual artefacts do kill the pleasure of watching quite effectively, sad but true.

e.g. we are fighting 'flickering' of pixels for our applications from the beginning as we started producing realtime stuff.

It takes a lot of effort and most of the time, very specialized solutions, and we still have them, that is in the nature of the technology.

 

I definitely can understand, that solving problems in a more general way can be quite difficult.

 

As a matter of interest, can such things be solved, using the sdk on client side or is this an issue, which only can solved by Unigine dev. team?

I mean the shadow fade?

(just a s an idea: could an image mask help on that? Would be handy, to use an image, defining the shape of the shadow area)

 

Best.
Werner

[ulf.schroeter]

WorldLight shades could be modified on the client side in case of no other alternative, but this should be something the engine provides out-of-the-box.

 

Also UNIGINE shader code is - at least for my personal taste - badly documented (seems like client low- modifications were no development target, only higher-level comfortable material configuration)

 

Change of current shadow mapping algorithm would require source code modifications with all follow-up consequences.

 

Nothing really desirable, so I hope we can motivate UNIGINE crew to provide some shadow improvements in one of the next SDK versions...

[v.sergeev]

Also UNIGINE shader code is - at least for my personal taste - badly documented (seems like client low- modifications were no development target, only higher-level comfortable material configuration)

+100500 :wacko:

 

Open source project with scaling and fading grass http://www.ogre3d.org/addonforums/viewforum.php?f=14&sid=f7d583a1fae96bba27845b3c478b6e32

[werner.poetzelberger]

Need low level shader developing!

 

We wil see how this all works, once we start seriously on that topic.

I hope the shader development will turn out somehow well.

 

b.w.