Terrain Parallax

[L B]

Parallax shading on terrain textures would be quite awesome. It would allow us to sometimes observe this kind of "going in" terrain at some places, instead of just a linear function. Hard to explain. mspaint to the rescue:

 

[Josh]

I did some experiments with this and found the terrain normals then had to be updated differently, for the contours to even be visible. The mat for this would not be simple. Right now, terrain normals are updated with a shader, so it is super fast. To update normals this way, the data would have to be turned into a triangle mesh and then calculated. For efficient rendering of terrain, this does not seem like a good idea. The best option is probably to cut out chunk of terrain and turn them into voxels or just a mesh you can pull around, the way the Crysis editor does.

[L B]

I like your way even better, just thought parallax would be simpler.

[Masterxilo]

Are you talking about voxel/cave/overhang modeling?

 

Looks to me like parallax/relief/parallax occlusion mapping FOR TERRAIN TEXTURES is the request, isn't it?

Crysis does this, le doesn't, does it?

[Michael Betke]

no it doesn't

[Josh]

No, he wants 3D terrain data, instead of using a heightmap, which would consume far more memory and be much slower to render if it were applied uniformly to the terrain. It would also cause terrain-aligned shaders like grass to not work. It seems easier to me to just make some cliffs and rock pieces.