Thank you ! Actually, the main source of inspiration comes from a location in Schizm 2 (I can almost hear that game's music playing when I link to my Age). But there may be a Star Wars influence as wellAloys wrote:Ah, right, I saw your earlier screenshot of that scene, looks nifty! I love the mix of high tech dome shaped buildings and a very wild landscape. Reminds me of some scenes in Star Wars
Also, to clarify: it's quite unlikely this place is ever going to be a fully-finished Uru Age. It's much too big, I doubt I'll ever finish it (especially since I'm never satisfied with things until I'm on par with Cyan's quality, which is impossible at that scale).
It's purpose is mostly to entertain me and train me to building, hopefully so I can work on smaller but good-looking Ages. While it's the starting point of this topic, I'm doing it more to discuss the technique I used to build it, and see how you guys would rather do it.
So ! Back to the mesh and its density...
Aloys wrote:The common misconception is that one need to have a lot of triangles for a terrain to look good. But that's not true, especially in a real time games. Most of the detail should be carried by textures.
Yeah, the terrain still has "a bit" too many polygons. Right now it's over 100,000 in total (without all extra meshes), but since it's textureless and since my PC can handle it, I won't lower it much for the time being (otherwise it's ugly !).
But I'll have to cut on mesh density eventually, as I'm well aware I'll need a lot of polygons for other meshes which are still pretty low-res currently (not to mention the domes aren't perfect occluders, and some of the inside might be visible from the outside, yikes !)
So yeah, optimisation of the canyon mesh is not quite done yet. The top plateau probably won't be seen from inside the canyon, so as you said I plan to work on reducing its density (or completely removing it... depends if the player can see a part of it or not).
Additionally, I think I'll devise some sort of automated LoD-building script. This will be useful eventually (if not for this Age, maybe for another).
BTW, I didn't use a grid terrain for my mesh - it all started with a simple plane, which I extruded and subdivided when needed. The rest is the awesomeness of the subsuft/displace/decimate combo.
In another Age I'm working on, the whole horizon landscape is built from a single plane, with very minor modifications - it's only using 30 faces in total (that's really the most basic you can do). But with the three previous modifiers, it results in really good terrain, which is completely customizable, and really easily.
Here is how it looks, with all modifiers to the right. This was done more recently with what I learned from the canyon mesh.
As for the canyon, here are the original meshes which are the ones I modify when needed, and here is the final output, which Blender creates itself. Alright, seen from here this is indeed too much vertices But I did say it isn't the final version.
I'm really fond of the displace modifiers I'm using - this works a bit like the voxel terrain generator I was using for Protergen (shameless self-advertisement ), but with more control over the overall appearance of the Age.
Oh, and while we're at it, it seems the "easiest" way to model terrain is to sculpt it directly in a voxel editor - I didn't try it, but it seems you can easily create mountains, caves, etc with it.
Aloys wrote:Most of the detail should be carried by textures. (in most games normal maps would be used too, not so much in Uru; maybe baked in the lightmap? can we do that?).
Yeah, I also wish we could use normalmapping for objects. But although it's supported by Plasma (look at Todelmer's asteroids), it's tricky to setup (I think it doesn't look as good as in other games either, but maybe that's just me). Normalmapping also requires real-time lighting, which is pretty heavy and doesn't always look good (most of the time, when I use real-time lighting, Plasma uses tangent shading instead of normal ).
However, it's possible to bake normalmapping to the lightmap itself, if you let Blender do it (that's also Deledrius' suggestion, and I think it will work well in Plasma). But you need a pretty big lightmap to do so.
That's what I'll do with the high-res mesh in the above picture, to bake it to a simpler mesh. But this will be once I'm sure I won't be needing extra modifications to the canyon mesh.
Sounds interesting, I didn't know about it. Thanks ! That would indeed prove very useful.Deledrius wrote:Sirius, you might want to check out Blender's Dynamic Topology system. It's a quick way to get extra polygons only where you have additional detail, and you can still retopo later before export.
Wew ! That was a long post. But creating realistic low-poly terrain is really hard and complex, so it's interesting to see how different people do it