[SOLVED] Terrain streaming

[Guest shane.ploenges]

I do remember now you bring that up Ulf, thanks. So i think the plan is for us to compress our couarse diffuse only to .dds prior to importing, and leaving our course normals as .png files.

[manguste]

we did this by removing diffuse and normal coarse textures per surface, and now use one coarse diffuse and normal per terrain - and only generate surface textures for masks.

Yep, in your case, this could be a good choice performance-wise.

 

If we compress all our textures, i can see the video card memory usage drop a bit, however it does not seem to write any new .dds files anywhere that i can find? in the coarse diffuse and normal slot for each terrain, it still refers to our .png files.

Hm, it seems it compresses only textures that are already stored in DDS container (and are uncompressed). Our developers will check this issue.

 

For now, you can use Import option:

• It will automatically store your diffuse in DDS container (uncompressed). Plus it will be split per-surface.
  
• If necessary, you still can have only one coarse diffuse without splitting it pre surface with this approach. Set the texture size (or higher) when diffuse texture is loadedWhen choosing a coarse texture size, make sure it is no smaller than the size of texture you load.
  

If I remember old terrain documentation right there was a statement that at least normal compression is not recommended due to compression artifacts...might be the reason why UNIGINE does not compress normal maps

 

We do compress normal maps! Compression into ATI2 format for terrain's normal maps works without any problems. So we strongly recommend to compress it. And that's what is stated in the current version of docs. (We've tested terrains with compressed normal maps - there are no visual artifacts from that).

 

So i think the plan is for us to compress our couarse diffuse only to .dds prior to importing, and leaving our course normals as .png files.

Steve, do not hesitate to compress both diffuse textures and normal maps.

[Guest shane.ploenges]

Another question regarding this - when using one Coarse Diffuse map that is not split in to surfaces, is it possible to bake all of the Detail textures to this one coarse diffuse map also? Currently it looks quite bad when detail textures can be seen to appear at the lod distance, however we do not want to raise the lod distance as it adds too many tris to the terrain also, and heavily impacts performance.

 

i tried using the grabber, however this seems to fail with an error - so i assume it only works on patch surface level.

Likewise for the Update Diffuse button on the terrain panel.

[manguste]

Update coarse Diffuse is specifically for creating a new coarse diffuse texture from surface diffuse textures. So it should not work in your case.

 

The Grabber is actually working fine. I've cleared per-surface textures and baked detail materials into a diffuse (dds or png, it does not matter) without any problems just now. You can try it on terrain samples. Could you describe your actions step by step so we can reproduce it?

[Guest shane.ploenges]

Will try again on monday and check the error.. thanks for the update