DotProduct2: Tiling and 'mutant slime' =)

(leifhv) #1

I’ve tried to convert the terrain in my map to dotproduct2 type terrain and I’m not too pleased by the results so far. The shaders are copies of Socks tutorial but I’ve used some other textures. (I’ve added an alpha channel to the secondary one.) Sorry, don’t have any screenshots available now.

The problem is that I have this strange effect in the blend areas where the secondary texture (grassy) is constantly moving/shimmering even if I’m not moving at all. It looks like the grassy spots are ‘mutant slime’ that is constantly pulsating/animating.

Does anyone know why this happens? Maybe some kind of strange z-fighting error or something to do with the alpha map in the texture maybe?

The second problem is that there are large areas in my map where there should be no blending at all and here the tiling of the textures are very visible. (For ‘old style’ terrain this was automatically fixed by scaling/shifting of the textures).

Are there anyway to avoid this or isn’t dotproduct2 suited for large scale terrain with large areas with only one texture?

Life

(Loffy) #2

I used this technique for the entire terrain in my outdoor map Duplex Towers and it worked well.

//L.

(leifhv) #3

Thanks, I’ll have a look at your map later today; but from the screenshots it looks like there are heavy use of blending (alphamod brushes) everywhere and this will certainly hide the ‘tile’ look somewhat…?

(Loffy) #4

You are right. I did toss in a few alphamod brushes here and there.
I can send you the .map file if you want to take a look at it, just let me know.

If you increase your q3map_tcGen ivector to 512 or 1024, like this: ( 1024 0 0 ) ( 0 1024 0 ), will the tile-effect go away (or be less noticeable)?

//L.

(kat) #5

You sometimes get wierd visual effects like that, that possibly have something to so with the alpha mask on the blended textures. I don’t get ‘pulsating’ but I do get movement that possibly is some wierd z-fighting as you suggest. I’ve noticed it doesn’t happen too much if you have a ‘strong’ blend, only seems to do it where you’ve needed or placed a ‘mid’ blend (using 50% etc. instead of 100 or 0%). Not sure how much help this info is other than to confirm you not being the only one that’s seen some wierd behaviour.!

(D3C0Y) #6

I had some probs to at the start, but somehow I figured out a solution :p… I’m using it for my terrain in Unterwasser (results look nice)

(Aborted) #7

If you remember the solution D3COY then post it here, we would like to know what problems you had and how you fixed it.

I’m about half way done finishing creating the terrain for my new map, then i got to blend it and stuff. Lets hope i dont run into trouble.

(leifhv) #8

Well, I’ve fixed the ‘z-fighting’ (or whatever it is). I had to adjust the alpha map of my secondary (topmost) texture. I opened the alpha map from one of the textures in Socks terrain_example and adjusted my own alpha map untill it had the same overall brightness and constrast.

I increased both the brightness and contrast of my alpha map…maybe changing one of them would have been enough, but it work now so…