ITerrainNode

You are an experienced programmer and have a problem with the engine, shaders, or advanced effects? Here you'll get answers.
No questions about C++ programming or topics which are answered in the tutorials!
Post Reply
DarkWood_Neo
Posts: 52
Joined: Thu Sep 04, 2003 7:45 pm
Location: Germany

ITerrainNode

Post by DarkWood_Neo »

At the day when the new release (0.4.2) was......released I tried out the new ITerrainNode. At first i have create a new heightmap (128x128). the a texture with a programm which is made to create textures for heightmaps. the texture has gfot the size 1024x1024 (!). I run my programm. an at first it looked very nice. but when i fly nearer i saw that the texture looked very ugly.

http://www.100mb4free.de/dwg/bild1.jpg
http://www.100mb4free.de/dwg/bild2.jpg

My Programm runs with a solution of 1024x1024x32 and DirectX8........

Did anyone know if the problem is caused by my gVideo card (Geforce4 TI 4200 8x AGP, 128 MB-DDR) or by an other thing..............
niko
Site Admin
Posts: 1759
Joined: Fri Aug 22, 2003 4:44 am
Location: Vienna, Austria
Contact:

Post by niko »

I think this is caused by the splitting of the large texture into smaller blocks. These blocks are scaled to a power-of-two size. Maybe this will be changed in newer versions, or maybe it won't look that ugly, when adding a detailmap. Also, you could try to adjust the size of your heightmap, maybe it changes the way the large texture is splitted up.
saigumi
Posts: 921
Joined: Fri Aug 22, 2003 11:31 am
Location: St. Louis, MO USA
Contact:

Post by saigumi »

Looks like the problem is that the texture being using is a very low resolution for that size of a terrain.

Which could be two things. 1024x1024 for a 128x128 terrain seems low to me. That's only 8 pixels of texture per 1 unit of mesh. This would get increasingly poorer quality as your camera gets closer to the mesh.

Though, it may not be the textures fault alone, try setting the TEXTURE_CREATION_FLAG to ETCF_OPTIMIZED_FOR_QUALITY before loading your texture.

Or, it may even be you nVidia drivers level of detail for hardware mip maps. By default, it's set to 0. By using the StarStorm drivers or a tool like nvHardpage or ATuner, you should be able to set it to the crazy LOD level of -15. =)
Crud, how do I do this again?
niko
Site Admin
Posts: 1759
Joined: Fri Aug 22, 2003 4:44 am
Location: Vienna, Austria
Contact:

Re: ITerrainNode

Post by niko »

DarkWood_Neo wrote: the texture has gfot the size 1024x1024 (!).
BTW: the texture I am currently working with my terrain is four times bigger: 2048x2048. That's no problem for the node, at least with LODs enabled. :)
Post Reply