Hi all !
I would like to discuss about directx 11 tessellation applied to terrains in Unity. Nvidia TerrainTessellation demo or sample is quite impressive. DirectX | NVIDIA Developer
As you can see in those screenshots, the displacement is very precise and constant.
When reading the whitepaper, they say that they use two displacement maps, a coarse one and a detail one. Is there anyway we could get that precise in Unity ? These are screenshots I made from a single 4k heightmap generated in World Machine 2 and imported in Unity rendered with distance based tessellation shader.
We can clearly see the pixel information of the map when the camera gets close even if the displacement texture is huge. Do you guys have any idea how I could increase precision and take full advantage of Unity new integration of dx11 tessellation for terrains ? Mixing displacement maps seems the direction to got to me although I have very small shader coding knowledge…
The second map isn’t huge it’s a tileable displacement map meaning it’s a much smaller texture that seamlessly repeats. There are softwares out there to make things tile. The precision of a displacement map is simply the resolution of the texture you use and the amount of geometry you have. Detailed maps = good looking terrain in this example. If you have both displacement maps working together then it’s just a matter of using better textures and tweaking any parameters you have set up to control the intensity of each.
So a shader using two displacement maps is the way to go. The hard part will be the normal map generation because right now the terrain shades because of the normal map applied to it(see http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/162670-Making-a-good-looking-dx11-tessellation-terrain). This normal map has been also generated in World Machine2. Do you think it would be possible to shade the displaced terrain without prebuilt normal map ?
