Simple Non-Repeating Texture Generation Method (GLSL)

[KrimZon]

On Saturday I coded this up, it basically takes a repeating texture and makes it look less repetitive, or at least makes it repeat in a random non-grid way. Bits are the same but the output is not tiled.



Here are some screenshots of what it does with some Quake textures:

I'm wondering how easy it would be to implement in a Quake engine now. I know Darkplaces uses GLSL already, but I'm not sure if everything's set up for using it to render world polygons as it stands.

Anyway, there's a code demo in the link if anybody wants to look at that or have a go at adding it to their own engine. I'll be poking around in DP I think.

[MeTcHsteekle]

ooh man, looks so sweet

[MauveBib]

That's freaking awesome! I would love to have something like that in DiD2. Repetitive ground textures are a real pain.

Come to think of it, could this not be done with q3 shaders anyway? Have the blend in the alpha channel, and use two layers ala terrain texture blending?

[GiffE]

Very cool!
If this could be implemented into DP I would definately need to use it.

[r00k]

Very nice!

Most Quake engines are old-school openGL projects using intermediate mode. This, helps programmers pull their head out of the sand and see what's possible on newer oGL versions, ~2.0 etc...

Dp and FTE are the most "up-to-date" savvy engines out there. I think it's a safe bet that DP would support such a feature, straight up.

But using your method, can't this be done by the artist instead of in real-time? You are manipulating textures, but those textures are STILL confined to the actual dimensions of the polygon. It looks perfectly cool for gravel, rocks etc. Wait i take that pre-previous statement back. Doing it realtime on the gpu might cost a few cycles but would save hours of effort by hand manipulation, and thus the random angle etc makes each "new" texture unique thus nonrepeating! Ah-ha!

I would like to thank you for your interest in Quake, as not many MIT students peer into this glass. Fresh talent is very welcome !

[scar3crow]

I think MIT is in reference to a style of licensing, I doubt KrimZon goes to MIT being British, and hes not new to inside3d, hes just quiet on the forums - hes more active in #qc

KrimZon - How do you think this could impact animated textures, namely the liquids? I'd be curious to see that one...

[MauveBib]

I can't emphasise enough how awesome it would be to have this in DP!

[metlslime]

This is cool, but I just wanted to point out that it is possible to make tiling textures where the repetition isn't obvious in an ugly way.

Generally you do it by making sure that there are no prominent and unique features on the texture, such as one obvious crack on a concrete texture. You can either remove such features, making for fairly plain-looking artwork, or you can include multiple similar features scattered across the texture. If there are 3-4 cracks of similar character but not identical, the repetition of those cracks will be much less noticable. Or a texture which is a bunch of grey pebbles, with one brown one. You can either remove the brown one or add more brown ones to the mix.

Sometimes it's not actually a feature but a coloration problem -- a high-pass filter is a good way to remove large shifts in color across an image.

[Spike]

[leileilol]

you could also alternatively pull off a .shader, having multiple layers blended with varying tcMod scales. Serious Sam sorta does that with a layer of pre-painted shading stretched over terrain to break up the visual. Zelda 64 even has a similar technique.

THIS IS NOT DETAIL TEXTURES I AM TALKING ABOUT FYI!

[KrimZon]

[mh]

[mh]

Looking at the formula again, this can be done using a GL_INTERPOLATE combine function where normalTexture is Arg0, scaledTexture is Arg1 and modulationTexture is Arg2. Doesn't need shaders at all.