Terrain in World Studio

This terrain is half a million polygons. It is rendered here at high resolution. I think I can use lightmaps for the shading, and the low-res LOD pieces will keep the same lighting, and look about the same as this beautiful terrain.

ooo sexy! Can't wait until I get my next paycheck so I can upgrade!

nice, cant wait to play with terrain. 3DWS is great tool

I don't mean to sound overly critcal here as I think I've missed the point somewhere along the line...

But basically it looks like a hi res hightmap?

Don't get me wrong, it looks nice, but you've only got one texture on it and no shadow mapping.

You're talking about LOD but not talking about final triangle count. Or indeed what application the terrain is going to be used for. I'm guessing games

As I said, I've probably missed something as I've no idea what this application does or is supposed to do and Josh usually does very impressive stuff.

Well, Iam just starting terrain right now. There is no lightmap on the image above. It's just vertex-lighting.

My point was I can easily handle 1,000,000-poly terrains with LOD.

I like the UT style terrains where you stamp down tiles and they blend with each other. That is then exported as a proper lightmapped blended mesh.

Yeah, I am using a system pretty much like Unreal Engine 2. It can't make overhangs, but you can't beat the speed, both in terms of production and rendering. I looked into HL2 displacement brushes, but the Unreal method can make huge terrains that are square miles big, and they are so optimized.

are you working also on an engine for all this that you plan to sell? got more info on that?

Do you do the terrain painting with tiles stuff or is it all going to be a texture?

How about raise/lower terrain by painting with mouse too? I like that kind of thing.

Yes, an engine is being planned. There should be a demo or something out January 1.

Yes, the terrain uses tiling alpha-blended layers, so the textures are high-res up close.

Yes, you can raise/lower terrain with a mouse tool. You can also smooth, apply noise, paint layers, and delete tiles with a mouse tool.

Can you make caves?

Is your blending method based off of vertex alpha or texture splatting or a mask texture (e.g., red channel blends texture0, green channel blends texture1, and so on and so forth). Considering you're using OpenGL, you should have the option to render the terrain sets with a fragment shader for the masking option. In fact, here's a fragment program for that.

!!ARBfp1.0

ATTRIB tc = fragment.texcoord[0];
ATTRIB color = fragment.color;

TEMP l1;
TEMP l2;
TEMP l3;
TEMP l4;
TEMP blend;

TEX blend, fragment.texcoord[1], texture[0], 2D;
TEX l1, tc, texture[1], 2D;
TEX l2, tc, texture[2], 2D;
TEX l3, tc, texture[3], 2D;
TEX l4, tc, texture[4], 2D;

LRP l2, blend.x, l2, l1;
LRP l3, blend.y, l3, l2;
LRP result.color, blend.z, l4, l3;

END;

No guarantee it works as I've just had it in my collection of shaders for ages. I really should test it in RenderMonkey some time.

Amon, you can flip a terrain, for making the roof of a cave. You would create one terrain for the floor, and another for the ceiling, and build your cave out of that.

For rendering terrain in the editor, I will use vertex alpha, since it is the simplest. For rendering in the engine, I will either use vertex alpha or a texture mask for non-shader cards, and a shader when it is available.

You first create a flat terrain, with any resolution from 16x16 to 1024x1024 tiles. After the terrain is created, you can scale the width and height however you like. You can choose the subdivision of terrain into sectors. You can choose the number of detail levels for LOD. All these changes can be made on an existing terrain, without having to rebuild the terrain.

Nice work as always.
My list of Christmas presents to myself is getting longer !

plan to put some physics into your engine and making it easy to code in and you could have nice product there halo! :)

make it so that it's possible to carv into the terraing for example making a tunnel into it...