Red Dead Redemption Techs
polycounter lvl 14
Hi I am playing on xbox R.D.R. and I am in total awe , this world is so full , large , rich and dense of texture details that I am really happy looking around , now I am wondering how that was possible hows that I can see tons of textures go seamlessly one into another , all in an almoust continous world and how is possible all this detail without loose in performaces? hows that engine working is there anywhere I can see some tech details behind all this magnificence?
Replies
You should also note the varying levels of elevation in the game which can be used as occlusion blockers. The ONLY stuff that is happening (AI, animals, side missions, local audio) is happening within your detection ranges.
It's a trick to make the world look "alive", but realistically it's only alive near where you are. This is why objects and people and shadows and textures can be seen popping into existence as you get closer to them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mipmap
This is kinda academic. Anyone working in games should know and learn these things, 'cause most games rely on the sort of things Ott desribes above, like mip mapping.
Mipmapping isn't a memory reducer, it's a way to prevent distant surfaces from shimmering like crazy. Mips actually cost a bit more memory than no mips, but the benefit far outweighs the cost.
Anyhow, a term you could research is "Level Of Detail", or LOD for short. There are loads of whitepapers on it.
I'm not all that sure if mipmaps are always great. Frequently things can get so undefined and blurry because of them. Turning mips off results in a lot of texture noise, but can look better than with mips. Especially with vegetation I've noticed this.
And if dds/DXT isn't an option, well, it's up to your programmer or your GPU. Unless anyone knows of a format besides dds that has native mip support?
Also I see that they do not use a nly texturee that by far gets mipmapped , they seems to use tons of textures mixed around and as distance increases you do not notice any tile or the like and I am really wondering how they did this...
ven the very big details of the rocks by distance when you get close they do not look blurred and undetailed but still very detailed and also wondering here how to do that?
Yeah I see what you mean, but can't say I think something looks "bad" without mips. I personally prefer the noise over a blurry undefined goop.
The sharpening is a good point, though I never export as DDS manually, I just use UDK. There's some sharpening options there, but it still looks worse than just no mips. It might be the LODbias, but me and that setting, we don't seem to get along. It never does anything...
Did you look at the horses? The muscles are amazing. You think they adjust the normal map "strongness" with some rotations of the bones? The area between the front legs when the horses run is simply brilliant.
Example: (see wrinkle maps) http://doc.crymod.com/AssetCreation/frames.html?frmname=topic&frmfile=WrinkleMapCreation.html
It's actually not all that hard to do btw. essentially it all gets handled in your normals and all you have to do is sculpt a high poly horse relaxed, and one flexing, then bake out both normals. Currently I'm working on another angry version of the shepherd on my website. So I'm sculpting him growling, too bad the game engine he's going into can't handle normal map blending.
wikipedia shot...
non mipmapped vegetation turns to tv static tbh. But mipmapped veg doesnt look that great either. The best solution is mipmaps tweaked by hand for foliage
On the money here. Producing good mipping results for this type of veg requires quite a bit of editing by hand; along with the right settings in the .dds writer.
I sit on my horse in the desert relaxing in the sunset and hell breaks loose.
anistropic solve so many of these issues i miss it... :-(
Next everything get streamed in/out depending on distance around player like Ott marvelous picture says.
I guess thanks to the foliage meshes all over the terrain they can easily hide the pattern, but it's there.
NAIMA, not sure exactly how RDR does it but usually these are handled with ragdoll physics, which can be fairly fast. You skin the rope/harness/cloth to a hierarchy of bones, each with its own simple collision proxy mesh. For the proxies you generally use spheres, capsules, or boxes; these shapes are in order by their increasing physics cost... sphere is one test, capsule is two, box is six. Box is slowest.
Euphoria is a runtime biometric solved ragdoll with animation blending and runtime animation construction with lots of rules.
If I was in pose A and wanted to go to pose G and impact P happened, what animation sequence would be required that didn't break my body and used energy conservation?
It's also really good for shooting people in the ankles.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-red-dead-redemption-time-lapse
- article mentions that the sky probably uses something like 3 layers (2 revolving 3d cloud layers and a fixed back skydome). Guess that's for a parallax effect of clouds moving over each other and the background is maybe something like an HDR for lighting the scene (perhaps done beforehand a baked to animated lightmaps)?
If anyone has any knowledge or theories i'd love to hear them.
I bet they only blend four textures at a time on the polygons, to keep the shader instructions low and therefore fast to render. It's pretty simple really... to blend to a different texture set you assign a "transition" set of textures to a strip of terrain, and use a couple textures common to both sides. ABCD in one region, then CDEF in the transition area, then EFGH in the next region.
Total number of textures depends on video memory, but it looks like they stream them in and out of memory as needed, because you can keep riding a long unbroken distance, no loading zones.
Anyone see the river to the North of the MacFarlane Ranch? They use a really cool technique for bending the UVs for the water, so it flows into an eddy and swirls around. Probably a normal map bending the UVs. Looks simply awesome.
Not very clear to me
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropic_filtering
I spent ages and ages hunting down portfolios of these guys. I can't find the one with the individual zbrush sculpts I spoke of but here's another enviro guy who still has his stuff online. Its awesome, enjoy: http://members.cox.net/ahernandez33/?detectflash=false&
You make roads/trails first so they are correct, you then bridge land between the gaps, you export pieces in streamer friendly slices. This bypasses a major headache in production, you will know the one if you ever tried to make land THEN roads, instead of road THEN land, if that makes it clear enough.
It would be cool if some Rockstar head would elaborate, it's not like it's some trade secret after all, it's just art techniques.
I hate terrain. With passion. I hate the way it looks. I hate the limitations. I bet it probably smells bad, too. All meshes plz
If Rockstar generated this stuff, it was in an advanced editor which allowed overhang etc. It is more likely that this is all created manually, using tricks to make it quicker.
Seriously? Maybe you were playing it on a 360, cause I saw a lot of it being played on a PS3, and there were blurry noise textures EVERYWHERE, particularly when playing cards...
Both, as I understand it. It uses the mips in the texture, but it samples them differently than the traditional trilinear mip filtering. Instead of sampling each screen pixel with a square shape, and thus retrieving a lower mip... aniso uses a rectangular shape that is closer to the camera perspective distortion (instead of just a square), so each screen pixel can retrieve a more accurate mip level. I'm not a graphics programmer tho.
I didn't see any overhang, except where they had vertical cliffs, which look like custom meshes. The vast majority looks like heightmapped terrain. Looks to me like they started with that, then split and edited by hand.
But yeah, would love to hear a breakdown from the source.
One thing I loved of this game are the rocks , are those using tiled texture reused on all or each rock has its own texture?