Crysis terrain oddity

I don't know what's going on here. At first I would have blamed voxels because I didn't understand them, but after playing with the editor and getting a better understanding for them, your guess is as good as mine.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Crysis
• terrain
• oddity
• ground
• bug
• texture
• deformation
• glitch

[str1kerfswc]

This is from the parallax occlusion mapping.

It's a common occurance with techniques which attempt to add physical detail to otherwise flat geometry, making terrain appear to have three-dimensional rocks pebbles or other little features which are too time-consuming to replicate with actual geometry.

Anyway, what's happening here is texture 'swimming,' which occurs more with regular parallax or relief mapping.

The offsetting of the texture messes up at low viewing angles.

[DarkSwordmaster]

That actually makes a lot of sense. Okay so now that I know, I will never look at textures at an angle less than about 45° or so.

[str1kerfswc]

Lol, you can't really avoid doing that, every now and then I'll be sniping at a distance and catch the occasional swim :P.

I normally just save 2 frames-per-second by turning it off (r_usePOM=0).

Then I only turn it on if I wanna' show it off to someone.

There's a faster and cleaner technique out there called Cone-Step Mapping.

I'm surprised Crytek haven't used that instead, especially in their upcoming CryEngine 3.

Their engine though, they'd know its limitations.

[DarkSwordmaster]

Any adverse effects from disabling it?

And as far as I can tell and have heard, CE3 is just CE2 made to run on consoles (so it has various optimizations and a couple added limitations).

[str1kerfswc]

When you disable it, you get simple relief mapping. It looks slightly 3D, but not as impressive as POM, but you won't get anymore swimming, since Crytek didn't set the offsetting very high for the relief mapping.

As for CE3, yeah, it's pretty much CE2, except there's global-illumination, ambient occlusion for normal maps, and other little things which I forget.

Plus it's renderer is more deferred than CE2, so it should perform better with more lights in one scene.

[DarkSwordmaster]

:'(

I want my GI!!!!!

[str1kerfswc]

Don't we all :P.

I've read several articles about the techniques available, and I reckon I've found the one Crytek are likely using.

Just search for the "Approximating Dynamic Global Illumination in Image Space" video on YouTube.

[prorsoft]

Alternative explanation: LOD fading. I be they are using triplanar texturing for the terrain (blended based on surface normal) and I guess the normal vector between two lod levels didn't fade very well, resulting in a bad texture projection.

My guess is that there happened to be a hole in the highest lod level, resulting in a steep normal, and when it faded the texture projection shifted in a way that it looked stretched.

Parallax mapping could indeed be another explanation.

[OGMO11]

did you divide by zero? that would explain it ^^

[tumultus101]

Go back to rage3d noob swordsmater!!!!!