I toying with OGRE around, specially the terrain component, i want to archieve an terrain like the new UDK landscape engine does:
with heightmaps around of 8192x8192!!! ( i think is made with virtual texturing),
my project i do, after the terrain is finished i create a huge city (created using Blender and Suicidator City generator http://cgchan.com/suicidator/) exported, using an special scene loaded in JSON.
It's possible to archieve with the upcoming version of OGRE 2.0?, if not will make an new terrain system if is possible.
It's possible now with terrain and paging component. Endless world sample will give you an idea of how to start. Ogitor even has a page interface so you can load heightmaps into specific pages, to overcome some of the limits of building an 8192 terrain all at once.
Ok, i'm not disappointed at least!.
But i have the problem if i can create detailed rocks like the previous image shows, i don't want very plain terrains with clipped textures, and about Ogitor, looks like the terrain page components supports a limited number of textures, doesn't support virtual texturing?
The terrain is limited in texture bindings by the hardware it runs on. Ogre does not impose its own limits out of nowhere, except by default each splat layer uses 2 bindings instead of 1 (diffuse+blend and normal+height for parallax). You can change that by altering profile options in the material generator, to disable parallax/normal mapping if you wanted. So on hardware with 16 bindings you could have 7 layers IIRC since a binding is used for the global normal, and lightmap. There's a global colormap if you enable it which would eat up a binding and force you down a layer also.
You can make terrain just like the image you posted, but of course most of the work goes into tweaking splat/blend maps and color maps. I use a combination of colormap and splat layers and have done some work on a custom material generator for my terrain. Coming from CE3 development I wanted a terrain shader that more closely resembled the terrains I created in that engine (colormap with colorless splat layers and customizable splat blend distances). I personally use World Machine so I can build out large terrains in chunks and translate them into pages within Ogre. No complaints so far but it takes time to familiarize yourself with all the code involved
If you use Ogitor you can sculpt and paint directly on the terrain which is pretty nice.
Also heres the issue of the lightining of the Ogre terrain system, which only supports 1 directional light, i'm working in an modern global illumination technique i think is called "voxel cone tracing GI", worked in raw OpenGL 4.2 with acceptable framerates, in indoor scenes, i'm trying to challenge myself to port it in OGRE for indoor scenes and terrain!, and also i was thinking to create an completely GPU terrain system, like the Scape terrain around the forums in 3 years ago.
