A better alternative to triplanar mapping?

[hendu]

Anyone know of a better alternative to triplanar mapping?


It's far too heavy for my tastes, tripling the fragment effort. Googling did not help much.

Since my terrain is gpu-generated (simplex noise), I can't preprocess the uv mapping either. I considered calculating the "proper" coords, but that would be either enormously expensive, or require me to derive, take a square root of, and integrate the simplex noise function, and still be enormously expensive runtime.

Something of the sort is needed though, I had too much stretching with normal planar mapping. Any ideas?

[REDDemon]

Triplanar mapping is barely the minimum needed if you want to avoid stretching without using baked stuff.

There are many good alternatives but every alternative will not work with GPU terrains beacause need something else baked. (baked tiles, meshes, textures and also using tiles on GPU is a bit inefficient due to heavy branching).

You can look at different tecniques to improve performance but ALWAYS at cost of quality (LOD biasing, dynamic resolution reduction etc... of course if you want to reduce quality of textures/resolution in favor of Correct-Looking this can be a solution. Generally a correct mesh/model looks 100 times better than a uncorrect model with high resolution textures.).

Or you can just hide stretched textures putting some grass on them..

[hendu]

Grass on near vertical slopes?

[REDDemon]

very resistant grass indeed many games place meshes like rocks/cliffs on vertical slopes