Terrain lighting tricks? Also a render of a possible new map

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Teromen
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Terrain lighting tricks? Also a render of a possible new map

Post by Teromen »

Has anyone come up with a way to have nice terrain lighting? Reasonably detailed shadows and such. I can use a plane with a bunch of baked textures but that comes off as pixelated. I did this in the skatepark map.

A thought has come to me to use my trick I used for my dead trees in Limahuli. Except place one sided meshes off screen to create shadows for the hills. This would be extremely tedious though. And very tricky to get to look right. But at least the taller hills would cast long shadows.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Also, here is a render of a terrain I've been toying around with. It might be my next map. Not sure yet. I wasn't happy with the generic tall steep hilly look of Limahuli so I learned some new tricks with hills.

I like the way the hills come off in the retail game. Very non computer generated look. I know they made the island out of clay or something by hand so that lead to a much more realistic random look.

Im trying to get to the point where I can make a new island for the game and split it up into levels for a campaign.

And again, if anyone wants to draw out a level on paper or in paint or something I could provably turn it into a decent terrain for the game for them so they could make a new map for us all to play. No one has taken me up on the offer hehe. I need the practice. Im just terrible at coming up with layout ideas.

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Re: Terrain lighting tricks? Also a render of a possible new

Post by TheIdiot »

If you want to use the exact textures (with baked-on shadows) from your render, you could use a bunch of different TrnObjs and arrange them in a grid, each one with a different part of your texture. That would allow you to use them at higher resolutions - the smaller of TrnObjs you use, the higher the detail. Check out the TrnObjs at the start of BE that form the starting beach to see what I mean.
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Re: Terrain lighting tricks? Also a render of a possible new

Post by Teromen »

I did that for the skatepark map but I think I only used 4 textures. Do you know the custom resolution limit for tpass-ce_v107e? 512x512 right? I imagine this would certainly get around the swp limit. I could test this out and see how it performs. I'll have to learn how to use custom textures in CE though.

I think I'm gonna make something bigger than the render, I want a longer map. But I'm gonna import the rendered one into the game and optimize it and upload on here for anyone that wants to create a map. I've been wanting to release some terrains for a while now.
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Re: Terrain lighting tricks? Also a render of a possible new

Post by machf »

I think CE can't use high-res textures for the terrain textures...
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Re: Terrain lighting tricks? Also a render of a possible new

Post by TheIdiot »

machf wrote:I think CE can't use high-res textures for the terrain textures...
Correct. You can still load hi-res textures over the terrain textures, but they aren't actually rendered to the terrain due to the way Tres compiles the actual terrain texture itself. There is no actual texture resolution limit as far as I'm aware - I've gone up to 2048x2048 without issues, though Trespasser's renderer is kind of mediocre at actually higher-res textures look all that good.
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Re: Terrain lighting tricks? Also a render of a possible new

Post by Teromen »

I doubt they would all fit in the swp file hehe.
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Re: Terrain lighting tricks? Also a render of a possible new

Post by Teromen »

Am I limited to 20mb of textures in the swap file?
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Re: Terrain lighting tricks? Also a render of a possible new

Post by TheIdiot »

Teromen wrote:Am I limited to 20mb of textures in the swap file?
As far as I know, yes. Unless there's a way to make a bigger .swp file. I've never managed to actually fill one without breaking the palettes, though.
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Re: Terrain lighting tricks? Also a render of a possible new

Post by machf »

The main limit for the .SWP file is the number of available palettes and indices, IIRC. The physical size can be increased by hex-editing the file... or by filling a blank file which from the start has been prepared so that it's larger. The main inconvenient is that the .SWP file is divided in two sections, and in order to increase its size, you need to move the start of the second section and update all the existing pointers in the .PID file accordingly...
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Re: Terrain lighting tricks? Also a render of a possible new

Post by tatu »

Rebel's Shell Generator can set the max SWP size during creation, which is 20MB. I don't know if you can have higher but 20MB does not relate to the file-size or amount of textures. A SWP is usually over 100MB anyway.
AFAIK it is really difficult to even fill those 20MB. I think the only one that has come close to it is machf with his autumn trees?
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Re: Terrain lighting tricks? Also a render of a possible new

Post by Teromen »

I can try using a lot of textures laid out in a grid but I don't think it will work very well. Would be a huge download assuming they will fit in the swp file.

I have to wonder if that swp file is compressed. That would make a huge difference.

Edit: A 2048x2048 render saved as a bmp is 12.3mb. So around 193kb per 256x256 texture. 64 total. I'm doing a higher res test render to see what happens. This is gonna take awhile on my old 4 core. When I get the textures added to the terrain in Trespasser I will post a link for anyone that wants to test it in game.

Edit: 192mb for a 8192 resolution texture. Split into 256 resolution bmp's that is 1024 textures.

I can't see this working lol. Im not so sure I want to manually apply 1024 textures to a tessellated sheet lol. Maybe there is a way to automate it but im not that good of a modeler to know how. :)

I'd rather just rely on how Trespasser natively does texture layers for adding detail. I might try getting the engine to render shadows from the hills using invisible models casting shadows. I'll keep working at it. I just can't see it working though.

Here is a couple examples of the render. Whole render lowered in resolution and a clip of original resolution.
Note: I'm using a default texture macro. So for the final render I would want to create my own macro from scratch. Using textures that look a lot nicer than generic noise textures.

If only bump-maps would work on the terrain heh.

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Re: Terrain lighting tricks? Also a render of a possible new

Post by tatu »

I can try using a lot of textures laid out in a grid but I don't think it will work very well. Would be a huge download assuming they will fit in the swp file.
It will fit. The terrain need to use the same palette on each texture, and the less palettes you use, the less SWP space it will take.
Again, the 20MB is not related to how many MB of textures the files can hold. This is what Shell Generator say:

Code: Select all

Choose Swap Size:  Input any valid # from 6 - 20. If User selects a lower number than 6 or a higher number than 20 for your swp file, the pid will be set to 6mbs by default.
Edit: A 2048x2048 render saved as a bmp is 12.3mb. So around 193kb per 256x256 texture. 64 total. I'm doing a higher res test render to see what happens. This is gonna take awhile on my old 4 core. When I get the textures added to the terrain in Trespasser I will post a link for anyone that wants to test it in game.

Edit: 192mb for a 8192 resolution texture. Split into 256 resolution bmp's that is 1024 textures.
Each texture will not be 193kb. A working 256x256 texture for Trespasser will be 65KB. As the texture needs to be 256 colour, it will end up being 65KB.
I'd rather just rely on how Trespasser natively does texture layers for adding detail. I might try getting the engine to render shadows from the hills using invisible models casting shadows. I'll keep working at it. I just can't see it working though.
If the terrain will have similar colour overall, you could create some TrnObj that is shadow-like and place those instead?

I think you should give it a try. Most work would be applying the textures themselves but you could always try to see how it works on a smaller terrain, TestScene size.
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Re: Terrain lighting tricks? Also a render of a possible new

Post by Teromen »

I'll give it a try. My mistake, 256 color. 66mb? I think so. That's not so bad for 1024 textures.
I need to lay off the beer lol.

It'll take a while to apply that to 1024 individual sheets in a modeling program. I'd love to see the results though. And I believe in theory the dynamic shadows from objects should work fine on a pre render. As long as I get them pretty close is brightness. I'll have to test it out. It would also be cool to throw in a couple pre rendered buildings with shadows for fun, for the test map. I've never used high res textures before but I would need them for building textures with shadows. This render has the lighting done in the terrain program, but I much prefer to do my final shadows in a 3d modeling program. Looks much better and the building shadows would line up too. The terrain program can't handle models.

What I do is render two layers of shadows. One of the hard line shadows from hills and such, at a low resolution or the same as the final terrain. And the other of a much more detailed terrain with random noise applied for detailed lighting. The second render doesn't have ray tracing. I find it looks very nice.

Edit: I would use the same palette for all terrain textures.
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Re: Terrain lighting tricks? Also a render of a possible new

Post by machf »

Why would you want a 8192*8192 pixel unique terrain texture in the first place? Keep in mind that terrain textures can be tesselated on the terrain objects... you can have a 1024*1024 pattern and have it repeated 8 times across in both directions, for example (or rather, use 64 smaller terrain objects in a square).
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Re: Terrain lighting tricks? Also a render of a possible new

Post by Teromen »

The original render has to be high res, then I split it up into chunks.
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