Do you need to model the whole continent or you use a real-time random terrain generator?
I have played a few missions from the latest Ace Combat game and I observed the terrain closely. I noticed the terrains are so massive and have very high detail that you can distinguish the shapes of the structures such as houses and buildings on the ground even the trees have 3d dimensions.
So I thought they must have painstakingly 3d modeled the whole continent on real world scale so the terrain never ends or feel it repeats no matter how fast you fly
Great! I tried it and it was good very good I wish I’ve learned it earlier as I painstakingly made bunch of islands by hand not knowing you can do it procedurally.
Terrain generators are also very efficient (and clever …) because they use “voodoo math.” Fractals and such. The underlying data structures are really very small, but the output is rich and detailed – and, fast. Sometimes if you fly around a long way and fly back over the same terrain you’ll see that it is slightly different, but hopefully you’re too busy dodging missiles and bullets to notice.
I can totally help you with that… considering my animation I’m working on is a ship going down an endless valley. If you still need help let me know. Endless Terrains have become my specialty now
As far as I remember having read somewhere that they used real images from satellites to create the textures and the cities. But the technique goes very back in the 90s in games such as “Flight Unlimited” or “F22”.
It looks like terrain generators might be a good idea to get a good starting point, but however if they stay 100% procedural they won’t be able to produce good results, they would still look fake. Perhaps combining these two would be the solution.
The problem is what do you do when you run out of “image”. I prefer pregenerated, this way you can have an endless map. If you are doing a still scene it works. But if you have a ship that can fly high up you can scale the displacement map along with material sharer, giving the illusion your flying up and the ground is getting smaller. you can fly up down right left. no problems.
if you want endless terrain…
I’ve experimented a lot!! I personally find the best solution is using the displacement in the material node.
Is is better the using the displacement modifier.
If you are using the current version of Evee, create a mov file of the displacement map in cycles and use use the mov file for the displacement modifier in Evee. A cheat till Evee supports displacement.
My project shifted to first person shooter but I still need realistic terrains, specifically huge African city style with seamless repeating building blocks for my game levels.
Give me your contacts I’ll get started when dev funds come in.
As far as I think, the best way to create huge terrains is right inside the game engine, no intermediate exports or anything else that would make things more difficult than they should be.
The problem with creating massive terrains is actually a very easy problem, is about storing the data in clusters (see more info about the BSP or OCTREE algorithm) and then loading in memory/drawing only the visible parts.
However with this mindset any Blender+Export pipeline must be avoided because it will result into troubles and difficult iterations.
I suggest better to work within the game engine because that way all of the data problems will be handled internally without any manual effort. Such as for example you can create and edit the terrain and the game engine will figure out what to do with data by itself.
I don’t know which game engine is used but if is Unreal then things will go smooth since there is a solution, also same goes for Unity also.
Are you interested to hire people or delegate tasks?
This is something that is best handled procedurally in the game engine itself. A lot of the terrain makers etc are designed for building a specific level. If you don’t need to be real world accurate or photoreal it’s a lot easier. A lot of them use procedural generated LOD tiles that are loaded based on distance to camera.
Not really related to what you are doing but here are some video’s from Microsoft’s Flight sim 2020.
It’s all cloud based generated terrain. Nobody else has the resources to even do anything like this but it sure is nice to watch.
Flight Simulator is the top notch result at the current moment, however is almost impossible to achieve results that look like that. Since they had the opportunity to reuse existing data from Bing Maps and achieve 1:1 perfect accuracy that way.
Heard some people playing the game on game shows and they went even to visit their house, inside the game…
