I have Unity pro v3.1 and have created a test terrain with 4096 pixel height map, 2048 detail and texture control maps having 8 different textures. I have painted 4 types of trees and 2 types of grass, and then…
I hit bake light maps in Beast’s panel and realized it would take a long while to finish calculating the maps. I left my powerful computer working all night and when I woke up next morning (after 8 hours); I found that Beast did not even start the progress bar!! I did this again with no hope.
Can Beast in the current version handle large and feature-full terrains? Is there anything I can do about this?
By the way, I am using dual maps with High light map setting, 2 bounces and 1000 final gather rays.
Such a heightmap terrain will not really work with beast. keep in mind, the lightmap thats applied to the terrain will be a single lightmap as well (1 mesh won’t use more than 1 lightmap), so you basically get ultra low details on the terrain when you try to lightmap it …
you should split it into reasonably small chunks so lightmaps can do anything at all.
also you might have such a large scene that it indeed just takes days to calculate because at 4096 pixel hm, I assume we talk about a 10kx10k unit large terrain or alike.
Actually the world I am intending to create have a resolution of (1m per pixel). this means the chunk of test terrain I have done is about 4x4 Km with Hm of 4096. I believe this resolution is the least in next gen FPS/ MMO games (some would even go for 0.5m per pixel)
Now If I want to create a world of 8x8 km (bearly enough for open world game) I would need 4 terrain chunks with 4096pixel Hm each.
More importantly, If I would take your advise and further split my terrains, lets say 1024 pixel each, then I would end up with (64) chunks!! which is extremely difficult to deal with especially when unity does not support external splat maps for trees/ rock /grass.
By the way I have lowered all Beast’s baking settings to minimum and a bak resolution of 256 and I managed to get a horrible lightmap to my 4096 pixel test terrain. GI is almost absent.
may I ask you, what is the recommended max HM resolution that would be unharmful to Beast?
If you don’t mess in the beast xml to raise the max lm size beyond 1024, then going above 256x256 HMs isn’t a that good idea (that still gives you 4 LM pixels per HM pixel)
But generally going to your size of HM isn’t a good idea as the whole thing is in ram all the time … thats not that optimal as we talk about a 32mb+ here, also you can’t unload parts of it as required.
With distinct chunks you can use asset bundles to load and unload terrains etc as a real game nowdays would do it.
You might be right on the resolution of next gen FPS but none of them use a single monolithic terrain object as you are approaching.
Can’t comment on MMOs but the last ones arrogant enough that high end requirements are acceptable flopped completely (age of conan) so I’m leaving it up to you to consider that an acceptable MMO resolution, but I would say: style is more important than 512MB+ VRAM requirements
I agree with you on the fact of using multi terrain chunks that are dynamically loaded/unloaded based on proximity. However, having each chunk with 256x256 pixel HM will end up in around (900) chunks if we maintained the 1m/1pix HM resolution for a 8x8km world! This is too much to handle in terms of coordination and design.
Good news is programs like L3DT can split a terrain design into many mosaic chunk in one click.
However, the problem stands in Unity because there are no tools within to allow you to work with Multi terrains with automation and ease.
Now I am seriously thinking of a script That automatically creates and arrayes any number of terrain chunks and automatically applies HM maps, texture and detail splat maps to each terrain chunk. and also do an automated lightmap baking process to all chunks as well.
Hope Unity is considering this in their future builds…
900 chunks are not exactly much, at least if you ignore the fact that other engines would stream such a terrain ie have infinite chunks (ok not exactly infinite but several thousands+).
For an MMO you need a significantly more complex management anyway already due to the dynamic nature of player characters, FPS gets away a bit easier as triggers can be used there.
I agree that a solid multichunk usage mode would be great.
My tools add that functionality, see the .sig
I have a new version upcoming for Unity 3, the old one works if you comment out a few lines in the scripts that throw errors.
I have checked your tool some time ago and I will most definitly buy it once you get it fully functional in unity 3. I also wish if you could extend it bit further by providing an ease way to automatically create a grid of terrains with a predefined setting and apply Set neighbors functions to each terrain.
