I want to make flight sim, where you can fly around tiny planet. For android. I’ve got Tegra 2 with 1Gb ram (less than 100mb free). So, I can’t afford huge landscape textures. After some
experiments I found this solution. Shader uses vertex colors and two textures (1024x1024 and 256x256) to paint all this fractalish patterns. Vertex colors containing baked elevation and occlusion data, big texture - tiled detail texture, to distort vertex colors, and small texture is color lookup texture. I can get effects like grass growing only below certain level, snow caps on mountains, glaciers in valleys, sedimentary rocks (took the colors from the photo of grand canyon). Playing around with this method is lot of fun, you never know, how exactly result will look.
Screenshots from android phone:
Just vertex color and vertex lighting.
First results was noisy. I thought, the only way to beat it is anisotropic filtering, but it’s doesn’t work on android.
But I found solution, that work on android - disabling mipmaps for color lookup texture.
Details:
Screenshots from PC:
1080 on click
Areal view with vertex lighting and fake occlusion:
