Displacements And Camera Distance

[deecue]

I'm playing with an environment right now and i'm trying to get the dirt terrain to have a barren, dried up feel to it. and since my knowledge in shader writing and vops is still pretty limited, i was looking for some pointers..

i threw down a vex riverbed shop to use out of box and it actually isn't looking half bad.. my only problem is that i can't seem to control it based on the distance of my camera.. a render from my characters waist and a render of a closeup of him touching the ground are drastically different. There must be thousands of cracks when rendering a close up shot while a medium shot may have 10 or 15.. i even tried to create my own with some celluar noise.. but it just didn't look as good and i wouldn't know how to push it further from being the basic shader it is now..

so yea, any help with understanding all of this would be great.

and of course a simple fix for a guy on a time budget isn't half bad either..

thanks all

[sibarrick]

Without seeing an image I'll guess at a couple of things for yer.

In the "long" shot the texture is designed to blur out the detail, as part of the anti-aliasing that is built into the riverbed shop, this might explain why you don't see as many cracks when you are far away. To improve this but so as not to introduce aliasing try turning up the render quality on your ground plane.

If you still aren't happy with the effect you might need two versions of the shader that work at different distances, in each you would set a frequency for the cracking that you are happy with. Of course if the camera transitions between the two that might present problems. One way round that might be to have a forground element and a background one each with it's own texture set the way you want and then try and hide the join. You could hide the join with other geometry or by creating an blend between the two shaders, this would probably require rolling your own version of the shader though.

[deecue]

hey simon, thanks for the response..

looks like upping the shading quality did it. i figured there had to be some sort of anti-aliasing going on.. I liked how i didn't see a jumbled mess going on in my background, but it was just real problematic from a short distance change. once i bumped the quality up a bit, i saw all the hairline fractures in a medium shot that i saw in a close shot. after that, meddling with the parameters to tone it down was all that was needed..

thanks for everything.. saved me a bunch on this..