Super High Patch Terrain!!

[photoman]

Hi! I was recently browsing the forum and I came across this program: AM Terraform

 

I quickly rebooted onto my windows partition and loaded it up. I then created a quick terrain and exported it as a A:M Model. Then switching back to my Mac side I booted up A:M and loaded the model.

First of all the model is 63mb. So after about 10min of intense processing and loading A:M opens it. It runs at 1.5 SPF in wireframe and about 25 SPF in shaded. When I go to raytrace it takes about 30 seconds to "calculate" the patches but after that it goes quite fast.

Im thinking of using a proxy model to get the shaders right and then swapping and rendering. Should be interesting.

 

Photoman

[John Bigboote]

Lake Placid! That's really cool...what did you use to generate the depths...an image or did you do it all in AM Terraform?

[HomeSlice]

Yes that is a beautiful landscape, but as you discovered, it is difficult to work with a model that has such a high patch count.

One possible strategy for approaching this kind of thing:

First, make sure the resolution of the mesh is no more dense than one CP every 1 meter - more or less.

Then drag the model into a chor and experiment with camera angle(s) until you find the angle or angles you want.

Any place there will be a character walking, you should keep the resolution at 1 meter.

Any place that will be in the foreground should also maintain the 1 meter (or finer) resolution.

But as the landscape recedes from the camera, you should decrease the resolution dramatically - perhaps any geometry falling into the middle ground would have a resolution of 50 meters, and the resolution of any geometry beyond that would be 100-500 meters. Geometry in the far distance might have a resolution of 1000 meters.

 

Then take the original image you used to generate the terrain and turn it into a bump map and apply it to the whole terrain.

Then do a few test renders of your foreground(s) and if there are any *small* areas that need extra resolution, either add it back in by hand or cut out a small section of your bump map and apply it as a displacement map.

Do not apply a displacement map to the whole landscape, that could quite possibly make render times unbearable. Also, if you are doing any animating in the landscape, you won't know exactly where the land is unless you bump up the real time resolution to 16 or "variable" polys per patch, which will slow everything down considerably.

 

Another possible strategy:

Cut the landscape you have into 50-square-meter sections. These will become your foreground sets.

Make another version of the landscape at a vastly reduced resolution and apply your bump map to it. This will be your background set.

Drag the background into the chor.

Determine where in the landscape the action for the current scene takes place and drag that particular foreground set into the chor and position it.

Now you have a nice resolution in the foreground and middle ground, while the background (which doesn't need such a high resolution) still looks fine. Rendering with a little Depth of Field may come in handy as well.

[photoman]

Ok got around to setting this up. Sigh I was too lazing to create a proxy model so I just setup everything* with the Super Terrain!

*I used a 100 patch model to test the material

Surprisingly it only took 18min10sec to render this at Panavision (2048x871) 5pass

 

Hmm I will have to tweak some more but hey it works and looks good

 

Photoman

[HomeSlice]

It does look good. Congratulations

[photoman]

Rerendered at a higher resolution. This is at double Panavision (4x the amount of pixels). I also did a few tweaks on the material, the material isnt very advanced, I could spend many a more time making it better (Like using bitmaps and different bump maps etc).

3x3 pass 1hour20min

 

Wire

OpenGL

 

SO..... this is definitely an animatable scene, A:M renders those patches so fast that it leaves burning time marks on my desk (Bad Back to the Future reference)

 

Photoman

[John Bigboote]

That is quite an image!