Saturday, June 17, 2006

Today I added refraction to the water. Pretty standard stuff where the reflection and refraction textures are blended together based on the fresnel term.

I've also improved the texturing a bit. If you look at the second image in my last post, you can see that the terrain at "medium" distance from the camera is blurry. I now use yet another detail texture in this region and the result is that the terrain appears to have detail at all distances.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006





Well, It has been a while since I had time to work on the engine, but today I had some time left.
A few days ago a found a tool called L3DT. It's a very cool and capable terrain generator and it inspired me to improve the texturing of the terrain.

Near the camera I use the same splatting technique as before but the textures are tiled at a much higher density so the ground look really highly detailed even if you look straight down. This ofcourse causes ugly repetition patterns further away. To hide this I blend in a large (1024x1024) color texture on terrain far from the camera.

I've also changed from vertex lighting to a normal map. This makes the lighting independent of the LOD and reduces popping artifacts. It also makes the distant terrain look more detailed.

I use L3DT to generate all texture data I need, since it does that a lot better than my own hack;)