Friday Early Knock

Painting and Textures

I got up early today to get back into the terrain stuff, which today was experiments into terrain painting.  Here is a quick and dirty video of where we are right now:

Be aware this video is scratch graphics only and does not contain any final artwork or editing controls. It is a technology demo to quickly test the editing capabilities of the terrain system and gain a performance metric.

I added a new parameter to Blitzwerks Terrain to cap the height of newly created land mass based on the layer/zoom height of the camera. This allows floors and outcrops to be created easily.

As an experiment I also added some basic grass colouring to the terrain affected to see what I might be needing when it comes to applying real textures. It turns out that even a basic colour can look good when multiplied by a detail map. That said, one of my objectives is to produce a high quality up close texture result on the terrain and I don't think blob colours are going to cut it for Reloaded. The good news is that both height and texture can be edited in real-time and it's a great starting point for the shader I will need to write for the next phase of this component.

Signing Off

As you might guess from my early rise and my early blog, it's an early knock for me today as jump in the car for a nice long drive. Join me again on Monday's blog when we test out the terrains ability to accept a shader and some real textures for up-close editing.