Crazy-sexy-cool terrain and foliage
Community Forums/Graphic Chat/Crazy-sexy-cool terrain and foliage
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| With texture shaders, the leaves, grass, terrain shadows, and trunk shadows are all in constant motion, with no performance hit. See it in motion here. Thanks to Peter Caddock for converting the file. Some z-order issues with alpha textures still exist:  Trees are self-shadowing. It's a trick, but it looks good:  Heavy overlapping projector shadows. Some of these will be applied to moving objects in real-time, but I don't know how much will be possible:  |
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| :o anychance of seeing the compiled demo? |
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| I will second that. |
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| Looks very nice "halo". I use BlitzTree3D for my trees. |
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| Butiful. just butiful. |
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| Updated with a movie at the top. |
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| OMG! This is awesome! If you haven't seen this movie yet then - well check it out. You'll love it! IPete2. |
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| holy crap. the self shadowing is awsome even if it is a trick. you have been doing alot of landscape tests, is this for your WW2 game or are u going to sell this just as a landscape tool thing? |
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| Mmm - looks good enough to eat. |
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| lol @ puki |
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| In fact, if you look on the ground of the above pictures - I swear those lighter blobs are sausage rolls. I'm off to bed to crack one off. |
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| puki...............i have non-plesent mental images now! |
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| Nice, very nice. |
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| Looks very nice! |
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| looks good |
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| Wow... very very nice :-) |
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| I don't like the foliage near as much as the shadows they're casting. I don't mean to say that the foliage looks bad, but I like the shadows more 'cause they really add another level of depth to the scene. |
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| Very nice, I can see all those tree huggers hugging thier screens over this ;) |
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| very neat,the shadows are cool! |
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| looks very cool! |
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| Looks beautiful Halo. I'm a little concerned by the frame rate in the video - 30fps with only 7000-odd tris, no action going on etc. I'd love to play a demo of this, maybe with scaleable options, to see what kind of performance trade-off one might expect on what equipment. Still, as I said, beautiful looking - especially love the moving shadows. |
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| The foliage, the shadows, everything looks awesome. Congrats Josh. |
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| that's awesome! |
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| All Halo has done is applied a couple textures to a basic tree mesh, and is rotating them. Step 1: Duplicate polygons on ground under tree. Apply shadow texture. Set polygons to multiply blend. Step 2: Create tree trunk. Apply bark texture. Step 3: Use planar mapping from above to generate second set of UV cooridnates for tree trunk. Step 4: Apply shadow map to second texture channel of trunk, using second set of UV coordinates. Step 5: Create planes for leaves. Apply "leaf texture" to planes. Step 6: And finally, to animate it all, simply use cosine to slowly rotate the two textures back and forth between two angles. Unfortunately, merely rotating textures isn't particularly realistic looking. Branches sway in the wind, they don't rotate. |
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| Yeh, but it still looks nice - I'd like to see it with little animals in there too. |
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| its not real-time shadow, but it can do good in some situations |
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| Games aren't realisitc... a good game pulls off many many tricks/gimmicks.. This procedure could work well imo, nice job halo. |
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| Well I tried calculating each photon, but it wouldn't run in real-time...plus my hard drive is only 120 gigs. |
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| Unfortunately, merely rotating textures isn't particularly realistic looking. Branches sway in the wind, they don't rotate. Yup, but that's more cpu intensive... you can use bones for making the tree animated instead of doing it in code but animated, boned trees would still take up cpu time. I like those trees because they look alive although there is always ways to make it more realistic than it is. Personally I probably would not have bothered to make the trees move at all, but if Halo wanted to add that little touch of eye candy, then why not. It's better than static trees for sure. |
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| "Games aren't realisitc... a good game pulls off many many tricks/gimmicks." I know that. All I was saying is that aside from rotating the textures to make the shadows and leaves move, this isn't a particularly clever trick. In fact it's pretty obvious. You could also get a more realistic effect at no speed cost by using animated textures instead of merely rotating them. If what you want is simplicity, this is better. But if what you want is realistic trees than a bunch of round textures on planes at random angles just doesn't cut it. For that you'll need to use animated textures instead. "Yup, but that's more cpu intensive..." I know bones are more cpu intensive. I didn't suggest using bones. Actually, if Blitz supported vertex shaders then you could do that for free, but it doesn't. I wonder if Blitz could support shearing models. If a 3D card can translate, rotate, and scale a mesh for free, what about shearing? Sharing would be just what we need to make 3D branches sway in the wind. |
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| I know that. All I was saying is that aside from rotating the textures to make the shadows and leaves move, this isn't a particularly clever trick. In fact it's pretty obvious. Yeah, but it's not a technology contest. If it looks good to the end user (the player), then it's a good implementation. And rotating/panning leaves tend to look good in a fast motion game like an FPS. Absolute realism isnt always (and shouldn't be) the goal. |
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| Oo there's a suprise, sswift ripping other peoples work apart...again |
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| only because it's Halo... :-) |
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| Sure the motion of the leaves needs a little work, but I think that's a minor thing. It would only take a little work to get the leaves responding to Wind_Input or something, more realistically. I think the more important factor is the performance hit of any system like this, purely in terms of rendering. That's why I'd love to see a working demo, to properly guage it. |
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| Very nice. I don't know about crazy, sexy cool, but definitely cool. I thought it was good enough that I was expecting to see the phone/power lines swaying in the wind. Puki has a good point - the squirrel and bird factor is too low in most forest scenes. :-) |
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| TroM (Posted 2004-08-17 13:25:11) "only because it's Halo... :-)" Indeed. I hold Halo to a higher standard than everyone else because he holds himself in higher regard than everyone else. :-) |
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| Amen |
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| Looks good to me. I don't know what else you'd expect ... as far as your analysis goes. |
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| Superb work Halo |
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