Far cry 4 mountains how?!

Hello! Im wondering if the mountains in Far cry 4 are a part of the skybox or are they standing in the terrain?

 

The devs said that any mountain you see, you can go to. They are real. Plus putting a mountain in a skybox is a bad idea anyways.

 

Is it possible to make such mountains in Unity? If so how?

 

Of course. You cannot do it yourself. These are made by at least 30 industry veterans. The best you can do is buy them off the asset store. But I promise you that you cannot make that all by yourself.

Either buy it or program a generator

 

Do a Google image search for "World Machine". They have a page on using it with Unity.

I'm not sure if Ubisoft uses this tool specifically--they are big enough that they may easily build all their own custom tools--but it is widely used by people to make awesome terrains.

 

theres many different terrain generator programs that produce Really amazing terrains.. google for them i forget them all..

worldmachine is one... there was a really good one, but i forget the name... havent needed it myself yet..

Terragen. ... but theres many terrain generators around

... theres a totally free one, i forget the name.. its not as amazing, but pretty close

 

You should check out terrain generation tools like mentioned above, the issue isn't making them it's making the game efficient enough to be able to stream in and out the vast distances whilst keeping the view plane long enough. Similar example is what I am working on, need to get more grass in without it dive bombing:

 

Well, since a game like FC4 will need 2-3 GB GPU card, I think it will stream smoothly.

 

The amount of memory a graphics card has is only a small part of the overarching issue.

 

the farcry's always look pretty damn amazing... enjoyed the last one (with the exception of having to install their bs version of steam... uplay or something...)

will def pick up the next one.

 

Dat 2nd ending doe.....

@ShadowK yes they probably did use some generator cause who the hell has time to make that by hand? Haha....

To OP, I have seen some really nice mountain assets but they can be a bit pricey. A generator is probably your best option and I'm sure you can find some online for pretty cheap. Also look into height map generation if you want to program your own. Just keep searching online I know you will find it

 

I think if you made mountains with the quality of Farcry 4, Unity itself wouldn't be able to handle them at a playable framerate lol.

I think the issue would be making mountains like that and still having a playable game in Unity. There's probably a lot of multi-core processing and performance techniques that are being used to make that scene playable in a game (like ShadowK said.....streaming etc....). I'm betting Unity doesn't have that kind of capability out of the box.

But.....I'm one to say that nothing is impossible. It probably can be done. They do look awesome

 

Well that picture I posted is from our game, it's currently 32KM squared and has more mountains than you could potentially throw a cat at. All running at 60 FPS on a 780m with a shed load of foliage...

Took some doing to get there must admit, most of it comes down to keeping the heightmap resolutions low I think we have something like 512 streched 512X512 maps all in sync which is then streamed in layers (or waves) dependant on where you are on the map.

Also much easier if you can LOD as much as possible, create enough mountains in the short distance to cover other mountains and give the poor occlusion culling a chance.

 

Dude, your pic looks amazing! While my game is just cubes with scripts on them, yours has very nice graphics. I must be the only one that likes the look of the Unity Shaders haaha..... gives it that ps2 feel. Anyways, game looks great and I will definitely pick it up when it is released. I am looking for some good RPG's to play cause I have none left

 

Going off topic sorry op, but yeah I know can't believe they delayed Witcher 3 AND Dragon age 3 ahhh! LOL.

 

QFT

And to add to that, calmcarrots was obviously being facetious, there is nothing stopping you or anyone else from making a mountain like that if you have the time and aptitude, making the whole game though might be a tad more difficult. Think of each mountain as a level, do the standard level design, concept, lookdev etc, make sub-levels if your characters are going to get close and you need events to happen on the mountain, and don't waste time on areas that wont be seen. Be prepared to use tools outside of Unity for shaping the level, the Unity terrain object is convenient, but it can't match z-brush or sculptris when you need a specific dramatic silhouette, and you can bake out the results including a heightmap if you still want to use the terrain object underneath it all.

 

But it is technically difficult if, technically, you don't know how to do it

But, I agree, in the end it usually comes down to the artist or designer. And ShadowK your pic from your game is top-notch man.

 

World Machine is an excellent tool for this. Use a ton of reference. Study mountains and note what you think are the most important details to sell their form.

Nonsense.

 

If you can use Blender. Use this:

It's called Ant Landscape add on in Blender.
Note: Johnathan in the video didn't make it too detailed.
But you can make the mountains and landscapes etc. more detailed.
Hopefully your GPU can handle the extra polygons.
The texturing part is up to you.
Enjoy!

 

Let's stop making mountains that way. It's silly.


Mikhail Klodt, 19th century oil painting. The hills across the river have the appropriate detail level.


Farther away, even less detail.
Themistokles von Eckenbrecher, 19th century


Stop hyper-detailing things that are miles away. If you can't touch it, make it impressionistic.

 

I've been down the whole giant landscapes thing quite a bit myself and I'll share with you what I've learned.

1) If you were like me, you most like got stuck in a "Torque" mindset approach to terrain. Unity is not Toque (Or Gamebryo. Or Crytek). Those engines are specifically built around terrains and use a large single terrain that is really several stitched together but designed to not be noticed. Unity needs multiple terrains and you need scripts to stitch them together.

2) There are two basic ways to do it. You can just lay the terrain down and let LOD do its thing, or you can make a tiny map of the world and weather then use a camera to paint the skybox (See Source Engine games). I have only done the former since I’m a broke ass who can’t afford pro yet (which you’ll need if you want to use render to texture for the skybox.

3) You can absolutely use world machine to make sprawling, Elder Scrolls sized, maps. I have. Here’s what you do: Load up WM and generate the map (you can tweak the map to no end too). Then when you’re ready export the splatmap into PS or GIMP and stitch them together as needed (The free version of WM only allows a limited size). Export that to Unity and slap it onto terrain, assign textures, paint vegetation, add water. Piece it together and hit play. Done.

I did this and I want to say it was about 20 kM x 20 kM (can’t remember exactly) with 1x1 M detail. With all that I was getting about 30 fps on my 2010 laptop. I only did trees on my starting tile since I don’t have LOD, but I think I got what I wanted to learn out of the experiment and moved on to some other thing.

EDIT: Oh right, and I should of course mention that WM is not that expensive and you really should buy it if you're going to use it. Also the free version does not allow commercial work and you can end up getting (rightfully) sued if you try what I did in my experiment and sell it.

 

I'm curious how you'd handle that hyper detailed, endlessly dense forest implied by the brush strokes in the first painting. What happens when you go there? Have you developed some amazing tech that gracefully LODs insanely dense forests into masterfully impressionistic ones when at a distance?

The farcry 4 mountains look great. Some mountains have hecka deets.

 

See for yourself. Turn on wiremesh, lay a terrain and a character controller, hit play and watch the detail change when you move around.

 

I was responding to @Photon Blasting Service who was advocating for less detail, while showing impressionist paintings that imply tons of detail.

 

I'm not seeing what's so impressive. Skyrim is current gen, and it has WAY better mountains.

 

Naïve. Mountains demand respect and present an incredible technical challenge to represent accurately.

 

Really too much too say about the challenges in a single paragraph. Obviously a mountain is an incredibly detailed geostructure that tells a story about the changes in environment over millions of years. Look at the pictures and appreciate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain.

 

That's personal taste - Farcry has mountains that look more realistic. Skyrim mountains tend to look like rock assets over rock assets smashed into each other and into a fairly low detailed terrain mesh underneath. While they do look impressive they are far away from looking photoreal. And if that's what you are after, Farcry has a much smaller gap to close.
Again - different style and personal taste.

 

Well said - it really depends to the detail you are modelling at. Clearly Skyrim is unrealistic at mountain modelling compared to FarCry3. Notice the shape of the mountain is not dictated to by a height map - I find this particularly rewarding to look at. Single level height maps are a grotesque approximation to use for modelling mountains.

 

So what? In the grand scheme of things mountain modelling isn't factor one. We have to remember that Bestheda are still a very large outfit with a lot of skill behind them, so the chances of doing realistic everything in a game for a small team isn't in their favour.

End of the day, the game looked good. Sure it's not amazing, mods do help in some areas but still for its time and the scale of Skyrim, got to give kudos.

You got to pick your battles and all that.

 

At first I thought these were mountains in Farcry. Then I realized it was a picture of reality lol. Wait I should double check......its a real-life picture correct?

It's pretty uncanny how good the Farcry 4 mountains are, in how close they do resemble reality. The Skyrim mountains look great, but you can see the "stylization" in them. Farcry mountains are closer to reality imo.

I'm still wondering how they get that clarity from a distance. I've seen some discussion on world machine and stitching terrains together, but to make mountains like Farcry 4 takes something more doesn't it? As SmellyDogs said, they probably are not using a heightmap (just guessing). If they are not using a heightmap, what are they using or doing?

Does anyone know exactly how they do it? Is it just the Cryengine itself?

 

I dont think so but thats my own opinion. But personal opinions aside there is very big difference in Skyrim and Far cry mountain construction, Skyrim uses mostly mesh rocks to define mountains while Far cry uses terrain only, which means that overall workflow is very different, so is the realism aspect.

As for how Far cry mountains are created my guess is 99% sure either World machine or similar software or they use actual real heightmap from real mountains/terrain becouse they do look very realistic.
So the answer is yes you can defenetly create the same terrain in Unity for sure.

 

Use World Machine. Its pretty good at approximating geostructures and you can get it from the program into your game pretty quickly. I use it a lot.

 

Unless, of course, I can - there is a great deal to be said about modelling mountains that really could not be fit into a forum post.

For example, consider the problematic nature of height maps - its quite simply not how nature works. In real life there are multiple details at all levels of height, not just one. Put simply height maps are only 2.5D. I already included a link to some photographs of some impressive looking mountains. If you take a few moments to observe both their form and individuality it becomes clear why a height map could never represent those mountains; there is just far too much detail - and the detail is what gives the mountain their character.

Next, compare the Skyrim style mountains with real world ones. Whilst these look 'mountainy' in the cartoon sense I cannot find any real world mountains that look like these. Compare this to the Far cry 3 mountain which is undoubtedly a closer approximation.

So, if not a height map what else could be used? Perhaps a 3D model? If so then that exposes additional challenges such as texturing, close up details, and so on.

I read a very interesting article regarding this problem. It can be found here: http://www.terathon.com/voxels/

I am uncertain whether or not FarCry3 uses this technique or something similar for their mountains and terrain but I am surprised there has not been a greater up take.

 

World machine is very good, but even still can only manage mountains of a certain style - the ones that play nice and gently erode from the top to the base.

 

I personally haven't built such a system, but we could start with discrete LODs and blending. Here's an example:
http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2007/GIEGL-2007-UNP/GIEGL-2007-UNP-Preprint.pdf

Another technique:

I agree that you can sometimes see lots of detail in the distance. I just don't think it's necessary or visually attractive. The Farcry and Skyrim examples are just...bleah. My personal taste has moved in the opposite direction.

 

I'm not an artist so I can't comment on that but the challenge is certainly also a technical one. There is no format yet for true terrain representation. Even higher resolution height maps present a problem. Imagine even a highly detailed resolution of 1 meter. Even that is woefully inaccurate for representing certain features.

I do know of one way of 'breaking up the jaggies' and that's to fractal-ize the terrain at close detail. The highly impressive Outtera uses this technique. http://www.outerra.com/

 

No need to use 3d voxels/models for that. Outerra's mountains looks photorealistic. It uses heightmap with some procedural noises based on slope, height, etc. You can move vertices in 3d, simulating erosion and other things in realtime, having only 2d info from the start.
http://www.outerra.com/procedural/demo2.html

Spoiler: Images

 

As incredible as Outerra is, its not photorealistic - yet. As far as I am aware there is no means to create concave terrain representations. Although trees feature heavily I am unsure if ground clutter is supported. However I have heard rumours that Outerra is going to be making some major improvements soon.

 

Well some versions of the far cry engine render the far view to a skybox dynamically, I've no idea if it's happening here though.

 

It's still dunia isn't?? so possibly it still the same

 

Mountains like the above aren't that hard to make or render. Since the game location is based in Nepal they're probably using some combination of actual dem data with some procedural noise and maybe some splatting for details (if they're generating them at run time at all). There are many applications out now that let you generate decent terrains completely procedurally if you want. In fact there are people making detailed mountain ranges completely procedurally just in a fragment shader.

 

Yeah although that's not happening for this game. It's compatible with PS3 and Xbox 360. Most likely, it's a proper terrain mesh like the rest of the game, except at a certain distance, it gets rendered to a cubemap. The occasional render to cubemap can be spread quite well over frames and cost nothing much despite the insane polygon count.

 

That used to be the case but installing (or writing) custom macros give you all the flexibility you could possibly need.