Megatextures production pipeline

Watch this video:
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/23179.html

From what I can tell, the production pipeline goes like this:

1. Terrain mesh is created in 3ds max or other editor. Textures are applied in a sloppy way because they can be cleaned up in the next phase.

2. The terrain mesh is loaded in id's editor. The mesh is UV mapped uniquely, and repeating textures are converted into a single megatexture.

3. Tile maps and decals are painted onto the megatexture.


So it appears that production is separated into two parts; geometry and texturing. And once the texturing phase starts, the geometry can not be altered. Watch the video and see what you think.

If this is the case, that production pipeline is going to be hell for the artists. There isn't any terrain editor, so they can't go back and change any geometry without losing the texcoords. What do you think? Is this really how they are doing it? It seems to me if that wasn't the case, Carmack would have said so.

Eeeh wrong! From what I understand you'll also have full control over the geometry from the editor ala Torque.

Link?

... processing ...

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/enemy-territory-quake-wars/770741p2.html

Son of a ...

Well, I found this quote from someone on Gametrailers



http://gametrailers.com/player/23275.html?type=flv#new_comment

However, as far as I can tell it's wishful thinking. I thought I saw Carmack modding the terrain but I think I had the Tech 5 video mixed up with the Crytek video perhaps.

There's a public beta, but you have to pay FilePlanet to download it. I did so for research purposes.

The terrains do a very good job of eliminating tiling, and the roads and tire tracks are very good.


The resolution is not that great. This is max texture resolution. On the left is terrain, on the right is a mesh object with regular textures.


It appears "stamps" are separate decals, not baked into the megatexture:

I have access.

EDIT:
Oh, you already got it.

What are those things lying on the ground? They look completely unrealistic/incongruous.

Hmm the texture quality is quite horrible for a Tech5 demo. Hasn't id still learned to use 2048x2048 textures?

After all it has always been the biggest drawback of baking against tiling. However, since this technology should 'stream' texture data back and forth from the videoram and the hard disk and/or ram (at least I suppose the megatexture system works that way), properly used videocards with a lot of vram should make the difference in the future.


Which is strange, since in the presentation Carmack clearly says that the magazines stacked in a particular scene are baked together, instead of having different layers one on top of another. These decals on the screenshot even look masked and without an alpha channel (maybe it's just bad use of the engine, or some features are not in the tech demo yet).

Is that really the full resolution texture? I know some companies send out betas with lower quality geometry/textures and what not to make the filesize as small as possible to save on bandwidth costs.

Those screenshots are from 'Quake Wars' aren't they? If so, it's not the same engine, Quake Wars uses a modified Doom3 engine (ie. id tech4). So you cannot assume that the new engine will produce the same results. There wouldn't be any point in making a new enigne if it did.

The texture resolution does seem higher in the small preview that was shown of the tech5 engine. To me the potential big issue is that according to what Carmack says in one of the videos it takes up to 15 minutes to compile the mega texture, which is really too much for an edit, test, edit iteration loop.

I am sure its easy enough to compile a section at a time for instant results with seams. When you want the final, you take your 15 mins.

I asked on the Quake Wars forum:
http://community.enemyterritory.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7315

They sort of danced around the issue and said that changes to the geometry can not be made if the UV mapping changes. Apparently the UV mapping is done in your own program, so it's your responsibility to unwrap the mesh. And if you make any changes to the geometry that your unwrapping technique can't handle, you lose texturing.

I think id's going to lose on this one. You cannot have a workflow where your terrain has to be edited in an external modeler, and can't be changed once texturing begins.

So it's just a huge 'texture baker' then?

I wonder what the throughput is for spooling harddrive graphics data and getting it into the gpu for display?

I find that a bit of a slap to the face considering how massive the texture is......when I first saw the thing I just assumed the editor dynamically produced a usable UV map and would compile out an end result for use when you were ready to test the actual game with it.

I wasn't that impressed with the game though, I much prefer Battlefield 2 to this.

I was quite impressed, so your wrong Puki :)

I can't just simply rename and open the pk4 archives - there are goodies inside and I want them.

I'm going to have to try harder. That mega-texture is mine to.

Mother sees zpak.

All will be mine.