U.D.M.T.O.
The magic door to the fingerprint world of uniqueness.

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Universal displacement mapped texture overlays.

This is a complicated name for an idea, so I would appreciate a better name.

Imagine an engine that can apply UDMTO to any place of any mesh in the game, and the designers provide a lot of those overlays for any type of item, overlays like, warts, scars, stains, extruding plunks, fabric tear marks, railings, jeweled armor add-ons, insignia, rust, holes, puss, stone carvings, war paints, moles, wall surface decorations, signs, tattoos, extruding brick corners, monster skin anomalies, buttons, and so on...

Then in Creation Kit, when you placed a mesh in the game world, there could be an option to apply a unification process on the mesh, and the engine could choose some UDMTOs suitable for the mesh and place them at appropriate semi-random places on that mesh, and let you fine-tune the result and add/remove the overlays as you like and save the result.

Or when you made an NPC, monster, or item, you could add some of those overlays over the body to make the body unique, and those overlays would be applied to the object references, as well as the base objects, so all the statics, monsters, NPCs, weapons, armors, and other items, could be individually different from any other similar object of the same type.

You place an object in the world map, then press a button a few times to see some different individualized versions of the object, then start to fine-tune the result and you will have a unique object with individual features placed in the world.

So for instance a wall will have a wooden plank extruded from it, or a face can have a mole, or a leather armor can have some daedric letter carvings on the hem and so on...

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And those overlays can have some sliders that would define from what distance they would start to appear on the objects, sliders for Player character, NPCs, monsters, items, and statics.

Even the ground surfaces can have those individual marks, like where a dragon has just crashed on the ground, or a Nord barbarian had signed the ground with his pee.

And there can be a memory stack where new and temporary dynamic UDMTOs are added to the objects and ground, so when a sword hits a bare arm, you could see an actual tear on the flesh, or a mark on a wall, or the chunks of bloody flesh can attach to the walls and ground, and so on...

So when the stack is full, the older temporary overlay would start to disappear from the world, except for the objects in the player's inventory which could have another stack for their temporary overlays.

On the other hand, there can be no stack for temporary overlays, and those overlays could be directly added to the reference objects, and stay where they are, until the cell is refreshed, and also diseases can add their visible marks on the bodies of the victims until they are cured.

If such a system is developed, there is no limit for unique individuality of object in the world bar the imagination of the designers and time constraints.

Ive got to say first that I am surprised no one has replied to this yet.

That is a very interesting idea though. I beleive it would be easily implemented too. They could have maybe 5 differant overlays they could put on the mesh and the overlays could go anywhere on the mesh with any amount of overlays. Interesting idea indeed.

S.R.T.O.

Sphagne's Random Texture Overlays

or

"Radiant Textures"

Isn't that what Nvidia's http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c_PVtMIz-A demo does, to a degree?

If so, it's DX11-dependent...

Very interesting, and well thought off. It's something that I would of loved to of seen in Skyrim but perhaps in future titles in fact theres a lot of games that could use this. Nice idea

Thanks If BGS were to implement such a feature, "Radiant Texture would be the probable name, considering their current trend of technology naming.


Really cool demo, and it is a kinda procedurally generated combination of several layered body meat and skins over a skeleton, which is really cool, but not what I suggested here.


Hope to see something like this in a TES game, like Skyrim.

Their Cumulative snow, and Dragons tearing the ground, is kinda like what I have suggested here.

This is called tesselation. It exists. It depends on DX11, and also lots of work on higher-poly assets, which would have no use on consoles.

This is why it will never be present in Skyrim.

Which is called tessellation? My suggestion or the demo presented by Benrahir?

Edit: I looked it up and it does not seem that tessellation is either of the methods.

What I suggest is adding patch overlays that are "bump mapped"/"displacement mapped" that would start to appear over items and bodies when they get near to the camera point of view.

If those overlays could be universally applied to all the objects on the world, when needed then we would have a world in which all the objects are unique, when viewed from near distances.

Could this be applied to TESIII Morrowind if we could get the mod project "OpenMW" finished?

I looked at the project.

Verrry ambitious and interesting project, if I may say so, but I think that it is designed to work with vanilla data structure that vanilla Morrowind engine understands.

Those new texture overlays require different data structure to define object references, to make room for those additional overlays.

But maybe when the development is complete for the vanilla data structure, they can think of a way to keep the vanilla data structure and add the new overlays to the object references in another lump or something like that.

Then there comes the actual coding of the problem and how to implement it without loosing much performance, with it's own LOD and vanishing points and so on...

After that it would reach the Editor stage, which would need another project altogether, but as Oblivion's editor was changed a lot via OBSE, maybe it can be done like that.

So I think it would require a lot of work to add it as an after thought to a game, and seems a bit unlikely.