UDK One-Texture Environment

    Basically created an entire scene using 2x 512x256 textures. This sounds very impressive and people instantly look and think 'wait, it looks like theres loads of unique textures in this scene', but there really isn't. The 2 textures (diffuse and normal) have different textures within each channel; Red, Green and Blue. For example, the red channel in his diffuse is simply a grimy texture to add variance, and the other channels have stuff like decals etc.

    To make the colours within the environment, I imagine he's using a constant 3 value within the shader to colourise his grayscale textures.

    If you saw his wireframe, it would make a lot of sense. I don't think he's shown a wire screenshot, because it would be very messy!

    Create a shader that reads the diffuse channels seperately and treats them as four different texture maps that can then be given additional color information through either parametric control or vertex color. The first channel is more or less just an underlying detail pass of grey metal, the next channel holds all kinds of cool shapes and borders and the blue channel holds decals and stuff and the alpha channel holds all hologram/screen textures. Now on the normal map you absolutely need two channels to cover for orientation, so the optimization is less aparent - but the blue channel is getting replaced to instead of holding depth information holding the actual cut-out alpha for the nice details that are stored in the green diffuse channel.

    All objects in the scene got this texture applied in modo already and instead of painting a texture on the UV, he mapped the UVs around the texture, using different UV channels/seperated geometry if I got this right.

    Yep, it's a very impressive work.

    Notice that you can export the models as obj/fbx file if your are curious to check how the Uv are done in your 3D software (because the UDK can't display them properly).

    By the way, the master material is pretty simple regardless the full scene.

    Very, very impressive.

    Followed this a bit over at polycount and I'm really glad that this kind of optimization mindset is promoted. It's an impressive scene and no doubt good use of texture memory there. It's kind of a fresh breeze among all the "2048x2048 normal, diffuse, spec" trashcan props out there.

    While that's true, I do wonder just how much overdraw there is from floating polys, and how expensive that shader is to draw. At the most basic level, all he's done is offset the performance cost for the scene from the texture memory onto the processor. While its an impressive demonstration, it isnt black magic.

    Quote from PhilipK

    Followed this a bit over at polycount and I'm really glad that this kind of optimization mindset is promoted. It's an impressive scene and no doubt good use of texture memory there. It's kind of a fresh breeze among all the "2048x2048 normal, diffuse, spec" trashcan props out there.

    THIS !

    Quote from marks

    While that's true, I do wonder just how much overdraw there is from floating polys, and how expensive that shader is to draw. At the most basic level, all he's done is offset the performance cost for the scene from the texture memory onto the processor. While its an impressive demonstration, it isnt black magic.

    they are not floating decals if i understand it correctly so it should be as light on overdraw as any opaque geometry

    Quote from marks

    While that's true, I do wonder just how much overdraw there is from floating polys, and how expensive that shader is to draw. At the most basic level, all he's done is offset the performance cost for the scene from the texture memory onto the processor. While its an impressive demonstration, it isnt black magic.

    Texture memory and disk read speed are bigger, more pressing limits for most situations than shader processing. He says in the polycount thread his shader's not exactly free, but cheap enough that an ipod could run it.

    You can kinda see something similar with Epic's latest "Samaritan" demo version. They replaced MSAA with FXAA- hardware AA with a shader- and as a result saved like 120MB of vram usage per frame, because FXAA is cheaper and way more compatible with deferred rendering.

    As an aside, I remember when Bioshock came out, Irrational were joking that they had so much room in their performance benchmarks for more shaders that they were adding new ones just for text rendering.

    Quote from PhilipK

    Followed this a bit over at polycount and I'm really glad that this kind of optimization mindset is promoted. It's an impressive scene and no doubt good use of texture memory there. It's kind of a fresh breeze among all the "2048x2048 normal, diffuse, spec" trashcan props out there.

    The funny thing is that Tor works with me at Machinegames where we use idtech5 and an almost infinite amount of textures

    Cool scene though!

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