Relief Mapping: terrain shader on a flat plane

You are looking at a flat plane consists of 2 triangles running in the Blender 2.5 Game Engine. There is no run-time subdivision, no geometry shader, all the magic is happening in the pixel shader. It's completely 3D looking, you can fly around it, there is light, shadows, bumps, shiny lakes, and even height-based fog. This is relief mapping.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• blender
• game engine
• tech demo
• relief mapping
• offest mapping

[starclopsofish]

NICE! does this work with Antialiasing/ Anisotropic filtering?

[mpan3]

@starclopsofish Good question. It works with anistropic filtering. 4x aniso really brings out the sharpness of the texture. Doesn't work with antialiasing though...

[onjoFilms]

Cool beans. What kind of UV unwrapping did you do?

[mpan3]

@onjoFilms You have the right idea. parallax mapping is essentially applying the texture, using an offset UV coord that is influenced by the height map. Relief mapping is slightly more complicated, but it's all texture operation really.

[MrUgliefrog]

Is there a tutorial on how to do this

[DigitalWorkz]

Is there a tutorial on how to use Relief maps anywhere?

[kassie2k4]

@mpan3 i guess if theres no actual geometry to aa it wouldn't work, though pixel based aa on some gpu's could probably do it, i think ati calls it "adaptive aa" or something, usually used for alpha mask aa for transparent textures, perhaps it would work here too

[eikons]

Downside of this is that it's rendered in a bunch of layers on top of each other. You couldn't walk around in this environment because you would look straight through the elevations.

The technique is nifty for anything bumpy that the camera cannot intersect. Like rocky walls or floors. There's also an issue with tiling, it tiles well with adjecent planes as long as they don't change angles. Apply this to a box and it will look weird as hell unless the edges are all at maximum height.

[DnBastard]

Eat my shit Polycount Demon!

[00DrCRazy00]

@mpan3 Im trying to look for a tutorial on this sort of thing. Have any idea or suggestion on where i can find it?

[Wintergore]

looks like what they used for just cause 2 when you fly up in the sky the world below goes like this :P

[icannotfly]

what resolution is the map?

[Davidproduction2]

Cool!

[Rekedens]

I can see use of this in CG-extensive films

[Macorult]

Coool!!!! :)

real-time or rendered?

[Macorult]

Coool!!!! :)

real-time or rendered?