Tuesday 26 August 2014

Houston, We Have Triplanar

After a three day bank holiday break, I returned to a huge inbox of questions, action points, feedback and comments from all across the Reloaded spectrum. Took a while, but whittled them down to five, and one of those was a useful email from Rick showing a great tutorial on Triplanar terrain texturing. So well described was the technique, that it formed quite quickly in my head and I was able to see how it could be grafted to the current terrain shader.



As you can see, the rock texture is not stretched now and uses it's own XY and YZ texture UV look-ups to create a perfect vertical mapping. It cost me a little performance (from 205fps down to 187fps) but will measure less than 1-2 fps when down in the 60 fps range.  For this trade-up in visual quality, I plan some more aggressive performance work to get that back with interest.

We also had a team meeting just before the holiday break and it was agreed that performance be given the highest of priorities where-ever possible.  To this end I will be working on shadow baking and render reduction so that we can get high frame rates on the lowest of hardware (integrated graphics).

The good news is that I have already made a good start on this process, and I will be getting some extra modern day assets this week which will allow me to show off what this new pre-bake step can do in terms of visual improvement and overall performance increase. I was using a new Ultrabook this weekend and was able to run around a small scene with characters chasing me and weapons free action at 70-90 fps, so we are not too far away from where we need to be.  Watch this space for some new 'pre-baked lighting' screen shots which should be worth a thousand words :)

14 comments:

  1. The new texturing is looking awesome. Thanks for adding that in. It is much appreciated. I can't wait to see how that looks in my game demo.

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  2. Love waiting for these blogs,well done team.

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  3. I like the updated screenshot. Even better than the first one you posted.

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  4. Great to see you are getting rid of that 'stretched' effect in the terrain. It really needed something better.

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  5. Looks great. I hope this will lead to a multi terrain texturing system where custom textures can be blended together in order to match custom media such as rock faces...

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  6. looking good, very pleased with that. thx

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  7. That is a great looking scene. I like where this is headed.

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  8. Excellent texture work! improves the visual quality of the scene without a doubt. The grass looks a little strange however, it doesn't look very natural.

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  9. It looks like a very good icy rock mountain side. If it's supposed to be a cold snowy scene maybe the grass should have a touch of snow/frost cover and also the hut roof on the right. Then it would be even more awesome looking.

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  10. It's either a late one, or he has forgot ;) unusual for a blog to be this late these days. The new terrain looks cool, and I like the sound of baking shadows being bandied, as static buildings and such will work just as well at the moment baked as they do realtime, due to the sun never moving anyway.

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  11. I fell asleep :) Blog now posted! Thanks for the comments on the new tri-planar terrain, nice to get some positive feedback. I will see if I can keep it up!

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    Replies
    1. That was one of those most missing things since the betas started, thanks for adding the tri-planar terrain, it makes Reloaded look much more complete!

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