[SOLVED] Terrain LOD transition

[Rob]

I have a question about the LOD transition on the terrain

 

When your moving further away from your mountains etc you can see the shapes change to the simple LOD shape,

in our game we have some very steep canyon shapes and the transition is very noticable, The LOD is set to 50, ofcourse its possible to set the LOD to a higher number but this would decrease the fps

 

So are there any ways to make the transition slightly smoother and less noticable without a big fps loss?

 

I added a screenshot in which you can clearly see the colors getting washed out because of the LOD kicking in, the left image is the canyon up close and the right is slightly further away

yous ee the dark brown colors being washed out from the top

[Guest shane.ploenges]

Hi Rob, i believe Unigine are in the process of giving us more control over Terrain LOD settings. What this means is that you should be able to control Mesh and detail texture LOD settings seperately. I think this will fix yours, and many others problems.

[manguste]

It seems you mean geomorphing that slowly moves vertices down to their position. It is used for smooth disappearing of vertices between the LODs (instead of suddenly changing a hillock with a flat surface).

 

Height map-based terrains are not good with cliffs or very steep slopes. They are intended for creating planes, hills with low-angle slopes and such. Canyons are far better to be done using meshes, because with terrains it is simply impossible to create convincing-looking steep slopes - they will be all stretchy and non-detailed.

If wish to stick to terrain, you can cut a hole in it and add a nice canyon mesh. Or you can cover the top of your terrain cliff with a finely detailed mesh (rocks).

[manguste]

Hi Rob, i believe Unigine are in the process of giving us more control over Terrain LOD settings.

No, LODs are still managed by terrain automatically.

[Rob]

It seems you mean geomorphing that slowly moves vertices down to their position. It is used for smooth disappearing of vertices between the LODs (instead of suddenly changing a hillock with a flat surface).

 

Height map-based terrains are not good with cliffs or very steep slopes. They are intended for creating planes, hills with low-angle slopes and such. Canyons are far better to be done using meshes, because with terrains it is simply impossible to create convincing-looking steep slopes - they will be all stretchy and non-detailed.

If wish to stick to terrain, you can cut a hole in it and add a nice canyon mesh. Or you can cover the top of your terrain cliff with a finely detailed mesh (rocks).

 

Most likely these heightmap canyons will do while testing as the canyons might need to be changed quite a few times

Already working on rock formations to cover things up/create entire canyons, but I must mention that the geomorphing seems a lot less noticable after the last update