One does not simply fly into Mordor.
I was quite delighted when I first came across the almost black (and speckled with milky quartz) type of rock, that is in those mountains, because I had not seen it before; Except it exhibited the most peculiar LOD effect, which caused it to render as something completely different, and very bright, up until I got to very low altitude. The ground pretty much looked like the light grey seen there on the plains bottom right, as I flew over it, and over no more than a handful frames faded to the completely different-looking blacker texture, once I got about low enough for medium rocks to begin spawning - it was like portalling between a before- and after the apocalypse version of the same landscape. (Incidently, I suppose the way indigenous scatter rocks inherit the ground texturing in Odyssey, plays a great part in how they blend much better with the terrain than with the old ones, and looking like they belong there, but also contributes to them almost blending in too well, and not standing out at all).
This total change in surface appearence also made the tone mapping spazz out, causing it to do little flashes of readjusting f-stops, as the presumed LOD cross-fades caused the whole screen to suddenly transition between bright- and dark texturing, and then back again when switching from descending to ascending.
In a way, when seen from ground level, it could be taken to almost look kind of fresnel-y; What was near me was dark, but the exact same type of ground farther away was bright as hell, not unlike the move toward total reflection you get with an oblique viewing angle on something, except the effect was equally strong in every direction, regardless of where the light source was, and it remained stationary; I could not duck up and down, and see the distance to the bright change in response.
Then there was the way this texture crossfaded with a neighbouring terrain type / texture layer:
There seems to be an awful lot of dithering in general in Odyssey (the modern prevalence of this "anacronism" in real-time 3D graphics seems to have arisen along with deferred rendering - don't know whether there's any connection there).
Spawning scatter objects "fade" in using it - "prickling in", in a pattern of discrete pixels (sometimes with a false start - coming in, and briefly blinking out, before asserting themselves), and ground texturing when flying high can to look like so much TV static, if one do not use a lot of supersampling.
Before higher LODs stream in, you tend to get these tufts of tiling textures looking so much like roughly torn squares of tissue paper laid out on a grid (...except it seems in Odyssey ground texture UVs can actually be differently rotated for different bits of ground, better following the sweep of the terrain, which is nice).
Not sure about the above.... Looks like a monochrome dithered transition to me... Maybe it's universal, and just that much more apparent in this case, due to the contrast.
...aaand our... "fleshy" ice... Those highlights really look rather chunky, do they not? -Like a lot of Bioshock-era Unreal Engine games. It's like neither the underlying geometry, nor the normal map applied to it, simply has the resolution, nor high quality "baked down sum" of a higher resolution ground truth, to render a realistic representation of what it is supposed to be, at the terrain scale -- a form of aliasing, if you will, resulting in this vacu-formed plastic toy reproduction of a landscape...
I kind of wonder whether the pre-drawn bitmap terrain features have mipmaps, or if the terrain-gen uses the highest resolution heightmap sources at all times - and if so, using what sort of filtering...
Terrain in general seems to me to look best when distant, and from the ground. This is the greatest terrain improvement in Odyssey, to my mind: Mountains far away has the characteristic appearence of large mountains far away, rather than terrain at all levels looking exactly the same, only scaled to different sizes. Still a bit too rounded, but...
When one get closer to those mountains, however, that impression falls down -- the geometry subdivides, and gains magnitudes of detail, which... should/is - not sure - realistically characteristic to terrain at decreasing scales, but even so, tends to look less like mountains, and more like a sheet draped over mountains stored in the attic, producing something of a "miniature" impression -- especially medium range, whilst flying amongst the peaks; I know this mountain is kilometers tall - my altimeter tells me so, but to my eyes it looks more like some smooth, vacumformed plastic fake cliff at Disoland, some three to five meters in height...
About the fish-rib pattern at the bottom of the shot by the way... That looks to me like a plausible geological feature - repeated melting, flowing downslope, and refreezing causing those terraces, or something, but I keep wondering, given what I've been wondering ever since it was revealed prebuilt heightmaps now come in picture form: Is it that, and intentional, or is it instead the manifestation of a bit-depth limitation in the heightmaps? -I mean, it's not like you can't have more than eight bits per channel, or even restricted to using integers, but still... :7
I was quite delighted when I first came across the almost black (and speckled with milky quartz) type of rock, that is in those mountains, because I had not seen it before; Except it exhibited the most peculiar LOD effect, which caused it to render as something completely different, and very bright, up until I got to very low altitude. The ground pretty much looked like the light grey seen there on the plains bottom right, as I flew over it, and over no more than a handful frames faded to the completely different-looking blacker texture, once I got about low enough for medium rocks to begin spawning - it was like portalling between a before- and after the apocalypse version of the same landscape. (Incidently, I suppose the way indigenous scatter rocks inherit the ground texturing in Odyssey, plays a great part in how they blend much better with the terrain than with the old ones, and looking like they belong there, but also contributes to them almost blending in too well, and not standing out at all).
This total change in surface appearence also made the tone mapping spazz out, causing it to do little flashes of readjusting f-stops, as the presumed LOD cross-fades caused the whole screen to suddenly transition between bright- and dark texturing, and then back again when switching from descending to ascending.
In a way, when seen from ground level, it could be taken to almost look kind of fresnel-y; What was near me was dark, but the exact same type of ground farther away was bright as hell, not unlike the move toward total reflection you get with an oblique viewing angle on something, except the effect was equally strong in every direction, regardless of where the light source was, and it remained stationary; I could not duck up and down, and see the distance to the bright change in response.
Then there was the way this texture crossfaded with a neighbouring terrain type / texture layer:
There seems to be an awful lot of dithering in general in Odyssey (the modern prevalence of this "anacronism" in real-time 3D graphics seems to have arisen along with deferred rendering - don't know whether there's any connection there).
Spawning scatter objects "fade" in using it - "prickling in", in a pattern of discrete pixels (sometimes with a false start - coming in, and briefly blinking out, before asserting themselves), and ground texturing when flying high can to look like so much TV static, if one do not use a lot of supersampling.
Before higher LODs stream in, you tend to get these tufts of tiling textures looking so much like roughly torn squares of tissue paper laid out on a grid (...except it seems in Odyssey ground texture UVs can actually be differently rotated for different bits of ground, better following the sweep of the terrain, which is nice).
Not sure about the above.... Looks like a monochrome dithered transition to me... Maybe it's universal, and just that much more apparent in this case, due to the contrast.
...aaand our... "fleshy" ice... Those highlights really look rather chunky, do they not? -Like a lot of Bioshock-era Unreal Engine games. It's like neither the underlying geometry, nor the normal map applied to it, simply has the resolution, nor high quality "baked down sum" of a higher resolution ground truth, to render a realistic representation of what it is supposed to be, at the terrain scale -- a form of aliasing, if you will, resulting in this vacu-formed plastic toy reproduction of a landscape...
I kind of wonder whether the pre-drawn bitmap terrain features have mipmaps, or if the terrain-gen uses the highest resolution heightmap sources at all times - and if so, using what sort of filtering...
Terrain in general seems to me to look best when distant, and from the ground. This is the greatest terrain improvement in Odyssey, to my mind: Mountains far away has the characteristic appearence of large mountains far away, rather than terrain at all levels looking exactly the same, only scaled to different sizes. Still a bit too rounded, but...
When one get closer to those mountains, however, that impression falls down -- the geometry subdivides, and gains magnitudes of detail, which... should/is - not sure - realistically characteristic to terrain at decreasing scales, but even so, tends to look less like mountains, and more like a sheet draped over mountains stored in the attic, producing something of a "miniature" impression -- especially medium range, whilst flying amongst the peaks; I know this mountain is kilometers tall - my altimeter tells me so, but to my eyes it looks more like some smooth, vacumformed plastic fake cliff at Disoland, some three to five meters in height...
About the fish-rib pattern at the bottom of the shot by the way... That looks to me like a plausible geological feature - repeated melting, flowing downslope, and refreezing causing those terraces, or something, but I keep wondering, given what I've been wondering ever since it was revealed prebuilt heightmaps now come in picture form: Is it that, and intentional, or is it instead the manifestation of a bit-depth limitation in the heightmaps? -I mean, it's not like you can't have more than eight bits per channel, or even restricted to using integers, but still... :7
