How to prevent terracing

[vdeijk]

Hi, I've been experimenting with various Gaia stamps for my game Mars Commander. Unfortunately, I've run into some issues with terracing: https://ibb.co/Ykd7ppw

What can I do to prevent this? 

The stamps are all standard Gaia Pro stamps. 

[Peter]

Hi @vdeijk, I know multiple causes for this issue:

- There is compression being applied to the stamp image (should not be the case by default)
- The target platform changes the stamp image into a format that uses compression and / or lower color depth (should not be the case for MaxOsX)
- The terrain is very high while the stamped mountain is rather low, e.g. the terrain has a max height set to 10.000, and you actually only use 500 meters at the bottom for stamping.

In your case I'm not 100% sure if this is actual terracing, or if the normal map on the texture is creating the impression of there being steps in the terrain - if you switch the scene view to "Shaded Wireframe" can you please check if those steps are real terrain geometry at those spots, or if it actually is rather flat / smooth, but just appears "terracey" from the distance? You could also try to reduce the normal map strength for that texture to be 0 to be sure.

[vdeijk]

Hi Peter, thanks for your help. After tweaking some settings, I came to the conclusion that it had to do with height differences like you mentioned. In any case, the problem disappeared and has not come back.

[Bryan]

Thats great to hear!