What makes this terrain look good?

[L B]

While Googling Betke, I stumbled on this;

Pay attention to the cliffs on the left, and tell me why I can't reproduce a similar effect, no matter how I try.

 

I also noticed that AA brings a great deal of smoothness and integration, but that's supposed to be somewhere in 2010 (my annoyance about it will therefore start in about 15 days

 

EDIT: Don't you think the oak trees have a somehow darker center than the outer parts, which make them look really good? What could cause this?

[Rick]

I say tesselation I'm telling you guys tesselation will be big!

[L B]

I call paralax, tesselation wasn't there in the time of that screenshot.

[Canardia]

It look somehow good, but it's missing a lot of stuff too which could make it look much better. It looks flat.

Crysis still has these unexplainable highlights on tree leaves, which could be roughly described as 4 different brightness levels on the tree leaves:

[Josh]

I see no evidence of any special surface technique. It looks like a plain normal map to me. Just a really good texture.

 

The SSDO effect I have working produces results similar to those trees, although I don't know if they are doing a dynamic effect or if they simply darkened the interior vertices.

[L B]

SSDO? Changed name?

And mind giving us a little detail on the "dot3" format?

[TylerH]

Screen Space Depth Occlusion?

... Dynamic Occlusion?

... hmm.

[macklebee]

screen-space directional occlusion

[Michael Betke]

I also noticed that AA brings a great deal of smoothness and integration, but that's supposed to be somewhere in 2010

Its just the sceenshot function. You render a 3500px screenshot and resize to 1500. THis is the effect you get. Crysis got not such an AA like on the shots by default.

 

For vegetation a "darkness" value can be set from 1 (default) to 0 (dark). Plus some Time of day settings here and the nice parallax mapping on terrain which makes it more looking good.

Thats all I think.

[Marleys Ghost]

Pay attention to the cliffs on the left..

 

A good normal map and texture.

[Michael Betke]

Cliffs are a bit boring. Some models should be there too.

 

I remember CE2 has terrain ambient occlusion. Really good feature: http://doc.crymod.com/SandboxManual/TerrainAmbientOcclusionIntro.html

 

Maybe this is what you meant while talking about the "dark" trees.

[L B]

That might be it. Actually looks pretty neat.

[Josh]

Is the Crysis AO calculation a step that has to be processed and saved, or is it dynamic?

[L B]

I doubt it has to be saved, since the documentation shows a curve of variation with different points. This has to be calculated in real-time, or else it would have choppy/no transitions between the different settings (unless you save a really high amount of this).