Jason Posted July 13, 2004 Share Posted July 13, 2004 Ah yes; I figured you'd be doing something more clever than that .. Matt: Of course not knowing the number of triangles you're generating doesn't allow the the user to have any true surface derivates to be used for filtering purposes. (texture filtering being just one of them). But I've seen the terrains produced by Terragen and they're not really susceptible to filtering issues somehow, considering the noisy nature of terrains. Always looks excellent! As for tighter Houdini integration, Mark : go for it:) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MattF Posted July 15, 2004 Share Posted July 15, 2004 Of course not knowing the number of triangles you're generating doesn't allow the the user to have any true surface derivates to be used for filtering purposes. (texture filtering being just one of them). But I've seen the terrains produced by Terragen and they're not really susceptible to filtering issues somehow, considering the noisy nature of terrains. Always looks excellent! Yeah, the reason the shaders tend not to noticably alias is because Terragen attempts to lock the sampling positions from frame to frame. As LoD changes, the renderer blends between two or more sampled LoDs. That way, the shader writer only has to worry about filtering issues if the shader has a very regular pattern that looks bad when undersampled. Luckily most terrain shaders are just noise... it doesn't matter if straight edges aren't perfectly straight, as long as they don't sparkle from frame to frame. That's the kind of shortcut you can take when the renderer is targetd specifically for terrain ;-) Having said that, the surface derivative issue will be solved by the time it's released, probably using the pre-tessellation step I talked about earlier. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest xionmark Posted July 15, 2004 Share Posted July 15, 2004 As for tighter Houdini integration, Mark : go for it:) Hi there, I've had a few minutes to look over the API, looks quite inviting! I will certainly give this some thought because it could be a lot of fun and be useful for other Houdini artists. My only concern is time ... time? What's that? Arrgggghhhh ... Matt, would you by chance be attending SIGGRAPH this year? If so, maybe I could get a few minutes of your time and talk about Houdini/TerraGen integration? --Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MattF Posted July 23, 2004 Share Posted July 23, 2004 xionmark, Yeah, I'll be at Siggraph. Drop me a line at matt@planetside.co.uk Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest xionmark Posted February 4, 2005 Share Posted February 4, 2005 Just a quick note: The MOLA plugin I mentioned above will get released soon (I ended up doing it on my own time so there's no ownership issue!). I'll post here when it's available. --Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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