Terrain Update

[dee.lee]

Hi Unigine,

 

First of all, congratulation on launching the developer support site. I'm sure all partners would appreciate your hard effort and warm support. Moving on to the subject in hands, we've been informed that there will be a dramatic update in Terrain but wonder when it will become available for our download and use. This has a significant dependency on our work schedule thus knowing a rough estimate would be good enough at this stage.

 

Well, will stay tuned for your advice.

 

Thanks,

 

Dee

INUCA

[Guest extaliones]

Modernized terrain will be completed at the September. The terrain editor will be built into the Unigine editor.

[cory.sharplin]

This is a really good terrain generator and would be good to support - http://www.geocontrol2.com/e_index.htm

[steve3d]

is there any WIP picture of new terrain system? or some feature list?

[dee.lee]

Modernized terrain will be completed at the September. The terrain editor will be built into the Unigine editor.

 

Excellent and can't wait for the update. Btw, could you let me know approximately when in September the update may take a place? Early, mid, late?

 

Thanks,

[Guest extaliones]

In early September, we plan to release terrain updates.

[manguste]

Here's a teaser feature list:

 

• Built-in terrain editor
  
• Heightmap streaming
  
• Holes
  
• Texture Splatting
  
• Optional triplanar texturing
  
• Automatic texture streaming
  

And a few screenshots to give you an idea of the look and feel:

[frustum]

http://unigine.blogspot.com/2010/08/terrain-editor.html

[packrobert.hun]

Nice improvements, very good very good. :D

 

Dont you plan to add DX11 tessellation support for the terrain ? Like this :

 

 

With a good LOD management it can bump up the performance/quality ratio a lot. And you could create that for ocean as well, like there is in the nvidia tech demo.

 

And procedural terrain rendering as a plus would be also awesome. (this can spare a lot of mesh memory )

[ulf.schroeter]

The new terrain system looks very good ! Are there any limits for

 

1. max terrain heightfield size
   
2. max terrain texture size
   
3. max material count
   

[alexei.garbuzenko]

Terrain rendering looks exactly as in previous versions, except for vertical texturing.

How fast is it? Is there a performance boost comparing to mesh-based terrain?

[ulf.schroeter]

WorldMachine 2 is another very powerful external terrain editor

 

WorldMachine 2 feature overview

 

Especially the Pro version supports very large tiled terrain creation, which seems to ideally match to the new UNIGINE terrain surface tile concept.

 

WorldMachine 2 tiled terrain support

 

Another advantage would be the ability to automatically create additional mask textures (e.g. for ObjectGrass)

[frustum]

Maximum heightfield size is 65536+1.

 

Shading uses ordinary textures with automatic streaming.

 

There are 3 levels of terrain rendering:

 

* coarse level (grid step is terrain size / 256)

* surface level (grid step is terrain size / 16) LOD4-LOD8

* patch level (grid step is equal to terrain size) LOD0-LOD4

 

Coarse and surface levels use unique diffuse and normal texture across the whole terrain.

There are additional precise diffuse and normal textures on patch level defined per surface.

 

Number of detail materials for terrain is unlimited. But each surface can handle up to 4 materials.

Each material consists of detail diffuse and normal textures with specified tile step and shading options.

 

Performance of polygonal rendering is awesome > 200Mtris/sec on GeForce 9600GT.

 

Fragment shader is very simple if compared with previous terrain implementation.

 

Currently we are working on terrain documentation. Terrain will be available in next update.

[packrobert.hun]

 

Performance of polygonal rendering is awesome > 200Mtris/sec on GeForce 9600GT.

 

Currently we are working on terrain documentation. Terrain will be available in next update.

 

that doesnt mean anything. On what FPS does it run ?

[ulf.schroeter]

Number of detail materials for terrain is unlimited. But each surface can handle up to 4 materials.

 

Maximum heightfield size is 65536+1.

 

Just 4 detail materials per surface with each surface covering a larger geographic region sounds like a heavy limitation in regard to achievable terrain detail diversity (especially when compared to some kind of megatexture terrain texturing approach). Also the new maximum heightfield/texture size seems to be smaller than previous clipmap approach (maximal terrain size is 262145 x 262145, unique textures up to 262145 x 262145)

 

I understand that the new terrain provides a more effient implementation compared to previous clipmap-approch, but does it also provide major visual quality improvements and/or functional improvements ? Most probably I am missing some important aspects here, right ?

[frustum]

Just 4 detail materials per surface with each surface covering a larger geographic region sounds like a heavy limitation in regard to achievable terrain detail diversity (especially when compared to some kind of megatexture terrain texturing approach). Also the new maximum heightfield/texture size seems to be smaller than previous clipmap approach (maximal terrain size is 262145 x 262145, unique textures up to 262145 x 262145)

 

I understand that the new terrain provides a more effient implementation compared to previous clipmap-approch, but does it also provide major visual quality improvements and/or functional improvements ? Most probably I am missing some important aspects here, right ?

 

In case of using 4096 unique textures for each terrain surface total terrain texture resolution will be 262144 for 16385 terrain size.

New implementation can splatting and unique texturing approach in same way.

[frustum]

that doesnt mean anything. On what FPS does it run ?

 

FPS will be 200 for terrain with 1 million of visible polygons :)

[binstream]

BTW it seems that we are to release next Unigine SDK in a week, we are wrapping up all changes and finishing documentation now.

[cory.sharplin]

BTW it seems that we are to release next Unigine SDK in a week, we are wrapping up all changes and finishing documentation now.

 

Sweet :)

[packrobert.hun]

FPS will be 200 for terrain with 1 million of visible polygons :)

 

 

On a 9600 GT :blink: ?

[manguste]

How to migrate to a new terrain:

 

1. Open the ResourceEditor (non-updated version) and go to TerrainEditor:
   
   • Export the height map
     
   • Export the mask texture
     

[*]Cut the palette texture into separate detail material textures.

[*]Create a diffuse texture for terrain basing on the mask texture. Otherwise, detail materials applied to a new terrain will appear faded, as they are blended with diffuse color (white by default) using overlay mode.

[*]Create a new terrain object in the editor:

• Choose Import tab
  
• Select the height map
  
• Go to Nodes settings -> Terrain tab and import a diffuse texture
  
• Go to Materials to add detail materials one by one and assign textures to them
  
• Go back to Terrain tab and import a mask
  

[manuel.gysin]

How to migrate to a new terrain:

 

1. Open the ResourceEditor (non-updated version) and go to TerrainEditor:
   
   • Export the height map
     
   • Export the mask texture
     

[*]Cut the palette texture into separate detail material textures.

[*]Create a diffuse texture for terrain basing on the mask texture. Otherwise, detail materials applied to a new terrain will appear faded, as they are blended with diffuse color (white by default) using overlay mode.

[*]Create a new terrain object in the editor:

• Choose Import tab
  
• Select the height map
  
• Go to Nodes settings -> Terrain tab and import diffuse texture
  
• Go to Materials to add detail materials one by one and assign textures to them
  
• Go back to Terrain tab and import the mask
  

 

Any ETA when the update will go live?

[binstream]

Working on it right now, I hope it will be available in 24 hours.

[steve3d]

wow, cann't wait to get a hand on this :) :blink: :lol:

[ulf.schroeter]

The new UNIGINE terrain looks very good ! Just one small question: how can global/or per-material specularity be controlled (specular material maps are gone) ? At the moment, there seems to be no other possibility than reducing specular scale for the world light, but this is no real solution as this also effect other Objects (and playing with 2 world lights - one for terrain, one for other objects - wouldn't be an elegant solution)

 

Would it be possible to add a global or - even better - per-material specularity scale factor ?