Carmack on MegaTexturing

interesting read.

thats amazing.. And great technology But i think that its a bit hard to make 32000*32000 sized texture

Texture tiling isnt that bad if you do it correctly so imo there are more important things to improve than this. I also wonder who is going to be able of making a 32000 or even a 8192*8192 texture. Youll need lots of ram and lots of time. I dont think thats very efficient.

The filesize will also be huge.

Still if it works its nice and its always good to have as many methods supported as possible so you can choose the thing that suits your specific situation best but to use this technique all over the place? I dont see that happening right now.

Does anyone really stare at the ground long enough to give two shits about how sharp a 32000x32000 texture is? I mean really? No, we'll be too busy shooting Strogg in the face and vice versa.

Yet more unecessary graphical features that increase development time :roll:

Read the article next time D3.

Anyway, it sounds like a fairly good idea, since it's not like you can't still just duplicate a texture in certain parts if you don't feel like creating every square inch.

Having all the terrain as one big texture is good from a development standpoint though as you can easily move bits around, assuming you have stuff on layers. It makes more sense to me to have everything on one master texture since you can easily get a good idea of how it all fits together, and don't have to keep track of loads of seperate files.

It's certainly no breakthrough, but it is a nice way of doings things and could help to lessen development time depending on the project needs. Obviously it's no good for a lot of types of game, especially those with many indoor areas.

Quote from D3ads

Does anyone really stare at the ground long enough to give two shits about how sharp a 32000x32000 texture is? I mean really? No, we'll be too busy shooting Strogg in the face and vice versa.Yet more unecessary graphical features that increase development time :roll:

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Q3: Aside from the visual aspect of the terrain looking better, do you think there will be any other foreseeable differences to us gamers that are playing MegaTexture games?Answer: It’s just the variety and the diversity of it. Like I said at the very beginning, this is only a very small aspect of graphics, let alone of games in the larger sense. It’s a specific little piece of technology that addresses texture resource limitations, and this entire technology would not need to exist if you had four gigabyte graphics cards, and lots more RAM

You have to take a step forward somewhere, even if its only something small like this. I doubt it increases dev time by much though.

I wonder if the artist creates it or the level designer creates it...

I don't really think that this matters a lot. A properly made texture with the right size and scale does not give any tiling issues today. So far the ground textures in QW does not look impressive at all.

Hourences, I think the point of the system would be that it would not require a lot of ram. As I read it it, the system would automaticly split it up and load the pieces in a dynamic way.

It's not just for terrain. In the article, Carmack states that in the latest revisions, he has extended the system for general purpose use. It sounds really interesting to me; it gives artists the flexibility to have basically unlimited unique resources (if they so choose) without RAM hogging. I'm unsure as to whether it'll have a huge impact like Carmack claims, but he does make some interesting points (namely that, for all our technological advances, we're still using heavily 'compressed' schemes for our data [small, tiling textures]). As long as this fits into the game asset creation pipeline(s) in an elegant fashion, it could prove to be very cool.

Quote from Defrag

it'll have a huge impact like Carmack claims

When did he say that?

Quote from Zacker

Hourences, I think the point of the system would be that it would not require a lot of ram. As I read it it, the system would automaticly split it up and load the pieces in a dynamic way.

Im sure he can code his engine to do that as described in the article but I doubt Adobe are going to code in the same support for Photoshop.

Im not going to open and edit 32000*32000 images with multiple layers in PS..

I dont suppose photoshop can reference files like Max has "xref" files?

Quote from Polaris

When did he say that?

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I do think unique texturing is the key for the coming generation.There are lots and lots of graphics technologies that we can look at. And maybe you add five or six up and they wind up being something that really gives it a next generation wow. But just by itself, even with no newer presentation technologies, allowing unique texturing on lots and lots of surfaces, I think, is the key enabler for this generation.

Quote from Defrag

When did he say that?

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I do think unique texturing is the key for the coming generation.There are lots and lots of graphics technologies that we can look at. And maybe you add five or six up and they wind up being something that really gives it a next generation wow. But just by itself, even with no newer presentation technologies, allowing unique texturing on lots and lots of surfaces, I think, is the key enabler for this generation.

I doubt he would contradict himself so I guess he must of meant something else by "key enabler", or he meant that unique texturing in general and not just what he's been working on will be what defines next generation graphics.

I believe that in the future most level textures will be procedural and only unique stuff like signs and skins of important stuff like characters and vehicles will be handmade.

I have this plugin for 3dmax that has hundrets of procedural textures. A lot of them look awesome and very realistic. The technique has improoved a lot over the last few years. Anyone remember the shitty "texture generators" of the first generation?

Procedural generation is great for some materials, but I don't think it will ever come close to replacing traditional texture artists for more than a fraction of stuff. Each procedural texture is generally a combination of known techniques (perlin noise, turbulence) that are tweaked heavily to give it a certain material's properties (such as wood, marble etc). You can certainly achieve some amazing effects with procedural texturing, but I don't think the control is there to create general purpose textures. How would you account for things like wear & tear, dirt, damage and so forth?

Sorry for the bump, but I found some documents about a technique which does the same as Megatexturing, this was just invented 10 years ago. That Carmack guy is appearently not that groundbreaking.

http://www.sgi.com/products/software/pe ... _intro.pdf

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gfx/Courses ... lipmap.pdf