Development Blog

features that are just "magic"

I watched the video first and was gonna comment "what kind of sorcery is this?!" but you kind of beat me to it. I had to watch it in slow motion. Rocks looked like they grew and shrunk from the terrain. Even understanding the basics, I'm not quite sure how that happens but I'm happy to settle for sorcery and magic.

This makes me happy. Seriously this is awesome, keep up the great work!

Looks great. I am really glad you decided to go this route. I know my answers to about everything has been tesselation but it really is the best way to get the most amount of polygons close to the camera. And that is what counts most.

Are you going to give us the ability to change the tesselation factor based on the distance to the camera?

Also can't wait for you to get decals working. This also works great for damage or wounds.

The tessellation subdivision will be automatic, with more polys closer to the camera.

That looks amazing. What kinda size texture would you need to do this?

I think with "high-quality" Josh is not so much referring to texture size (2k should be enough) but about how meaningful the displacement map is. This is a grey-scale with black being "no vertical height" and white "full displacement". Often this is generated by some tool from the diffuse map (photo of rock surface), but this will be noisy due to colored specks etc. Using that as a displacement map will create unrealistic spikes. It's better to generate it from rocks etc. sculpted in a 3D modelling tool.

This is neat!