Making a good looking dx11 tessellation terrain

[snow404]

I am using the asset Advanced surface shaders and trying to produce a good looking terrain tessellated with directx 11.

Is there a way to shade that terrain without using a large normal map ? The terrain on the left is tessellated and displaced but has no normal map. The problem is that is I use a large normal map to shade the terrain, I can not use a tiled one to create a subtile rocky surface relief.

I also would like to use splat maps to texture the terrain, but can not find out how…

Any idea on this ? The main reason to use local distance based tessellation instead of regular unity terrains is huge framerate increase !!

I am trying to get the closest results I can to nvidia TerrainTessellation sample wich I think is procedurally generated. DirectX | NVIDIA Developer

[ChaseRLewis73003]

@snow404

I am using the asset Advanced surface shaders and trying to produce a good looking terrain tessellated with directx 11.

Is there a way to shade that terrain without using a large normal map ? The terrain on the left is tessellated and displaced but has no normal map. The problem is that is I use a large normal map to shade the terrain, I can not use a tiled one to create a subtile rocky surface relief.

I also would like to use splat maps to texture the terrain, but can not find out how…

Any idea on this ? The main reason to use local distance based tessellation instead of regular unity terrains is huge framerate increase !!

I am trying to get the closest results I can to nvidia TerrainTessellation sample wich I think is procedurally generated. DirectX | NVIDIA Developer

I don’t see why you couldn’t tile a normal map if you make sure it’s built in a way to tile (no obvious seams). All a normal map does is create a new normal based on the incoming tangent vector (from my understanding). If the tangent vector is different a tiled normal map should work fine. Now … if your annoyed that you might want certain areas smooth and others not smooth that would be an issue with texture blending (controlling the strength of the tiled normal map based on perhaps height or even the normal). Regardless adding that type of control will require a customized shader.

Our technique uses two displacement maps, applied at different scales. The coarse displacement map is a 1024x1024 texture that covers the entire world. It defines the broad, overall shape of the landscape: the hills and valleys. In our sample, the coarse displacement map is generated procedurally from fractals. After (F. Kenton Musgrave, 2002), we create a “hybrid” terrain from a combination of ridge noise and fBm noise. This is rendered to a texture whenever the viewpoint moves.
The detailed displacement map is a repeating, generic map containing 5 octaves of fBm noise. The detail map was also created by a version of our sample in order to give noise characteristics that are similar to the coarse map. It was manually edited in Photoshop to make it tile. The detail map is also a 1024x1024 map in our sample and is shown in Figure 16.

Just read the paper. Ya they use a tiled second displacement map.

[snow404]

Sorry I read that part of the paper shortly after producing this post. Two displacement maps really makes sense.

The shader im using right now needs a normal map to shade the hills and valleys. So im using a displacement map and a normal map produced in World Machine 2. So I can not use the normal map slot of the material to use as a tiled normal map. Also writing a shader with two displacement inputs would need to have normal calculation or have two normal maps inputs ? Is it possible to get the hills and valleys shading without using a precalculated normal map when coding that type of shader ? I might have to start shader coding for this project…

[duke_1]

Sample the heightmap in the pixel shader to get your normals. See page 43: http://dice.se/wp-content/uploads/Chapter5-Andersson-Terrain_Rendering_in_Frostbite.pdf