24 Hour Terrain Demo

Your reply prompted me to try the downloads again, and this time it's actually (currently) downloading. Previously they came in around ~60kb, and the archives wouldn't open.

But they seem to work now.

 

Are you still doing those screenshot contests?

 

Chrome says "TheSearch v1.1 windows 64 bit." is malicious.

 

Hello,

You can turn it off in chrome:
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/4412392?hl=en

Or you can try another browser like internet explorer or firefox.

Nathaniel

 

Hello,

At the moment not anymore...

Nathaniel

 

http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=79637 <-- eyefinity pic from the 64bit version.... click it if you want to zoom

I am currently following the "24 Hour demo - How we made it" pdf to try to make something similar...the main reason why I ended up here and tested this demo out.

I also have a question... can I use the attached pic and place it in a splash screen for my game?.. since I have all those assets and will be using them and this one is already made..

 

Hello,

Sure you can use the splash screen . We look forward to see what you have made , please share with us when you are done...

Nathaniel

 

geezus, this looks incredible. Has anyone run this on a mobile device yet? I'm thinking of picking it up for my racing game but would love to know how the performance is on mobile devices..

 

It doesn't run well on mobile devices with these graphics, this demo can be made for mobile, but it wouldn't look as good and not as much vegetation...But TC and WC can be used for mobile games as well.

Nathaniel

 

This landscape looks great. In my attempts to make something of a similar scale I always run into the precision error problems. If the player goes a few thousand metres away from world 0,0,0 then things go wobbly.

I use 1 Unity unit = 1m. Are you using a reduced scale for this? (0.1 Unity unit = 1m maybe) Or are the problems just avoided in some way.

 

Hello, this is a general issue in game engines. As Transforms and Mesh Vertices are using floats, and these get more imprecise the further you move away from the World zero point (0,0,0). 1000m shouldn't be an issue though, you properly need a higher near clipping on you camera. What we did in the 24 hour demo is using 2 camera's to get less z-fighting. You can find a lot information about this issue online...

Nathaniel

 

Hello Everyone,

This is the very special artistic attempt to realtime rendering in Unity3d using Relief Terrain Pack (RTP3.0 exactly). We also used Terrain Composer and AFS2.04 plus a few other asset store goodies. As most of the work was done over a year ago, new versions of the these packages were released (expect even better quality with the up to date versions).

About the water/underwater - as you probably would like to ask about it - it's a custom shading solution (not publicly available)

RTP comes with terrain surface water solution though (like it runs down the rocks when tides goes away at 0:35). You can refer to our product pages on Asset Store to know what's included and available to the community.

 

Where is 'World Composer's demo?

 

Great video. I was wondering how you made the paths around the mountains - did you use the built in tools or something else ? Cheers

 

The 24 demo is a WorldComposer demo, as the heightmap and colormap is from real world data extracted with WorldComposer.

Nathaniel

 

EasyRoads is used for this.

Nathaniel

 

Hi guys.

Is it illegale to use real world data for a game ?
Let's say I use worldcomposer and use a "photo" from a random mountain ?

What does the law say about it ?

Cheers!

 

This is a grey area and you can read the discussion on the first page of the WorldComposer forum:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/wo...create-real-world-aaa-quality-terrain.215485/

Nathaniel

 

Hello everyone,

As promised I made a new WorldComposer tutorial on how to make a huge terrain with using the multi-resolution technique. This tutorial is how I made the FrancsPeak 922x922 km terrain, you can see this terrain is the WorldComposer showcase video's. I use RTP for rendering in the showcase video's, so in those video's the render quality is a lot better.

I made a new update for WorldComposer (version 1.2). I added a new converter that converts ArcInfo ASCII heightmap files to 16 bit raw grey scale raw heightmaps. The raw format is the format WorldComposer and TerrainComposer can use. Also I made some fixes, and you need version 1.2 to do this tutorial. You can update WC in the WC Window with the 'Update' tab. I submitted version 1.2 to the Asset Store today.

Also I made a new WorldComposer tutorial on how to remove shadows from the satellite images:

Nathaniel

 

Impressive. How did you handle the LOD? I could barely notice any transitions for either the trees or the terrain, nor any pause for putting in new terrain chunks as you move around.

 

There's not any streaming of terrain chunks. We only used 2x2 Unity terrain tiles. And the tree system is handled by Advanced Foliage Shader and Unity terrain tree system.

Nathaniel

 

But Unity terrain has (or used to have) popping issues, unless they fixed that for 4.0 and up. I haven't upgraded in awhile...

 

so beautiful I'm drooling

 

In terms of a grey area with real-world data, is it just the textures or the heightmaps too?

Also, do you think you could do a tutorial on runtime terrain generation with Terrain Composer (or even World Composer)?

 

Oh you mean pixel error, yes Unity terrain heightmap has quite some visible popping. But we use RTP's feature of global normal map. And this feature hides the popping very well and also it makes the heightmap look much more detailed, especially at far distance.

Nathaniel

 

For TerrainComposer, I made documentation with example script for this for both Unity script and C#, which can be downloaded here:
http://www.terraincomposer.com/runtime/

As for WorldComposer using at runtime, this you cannot do with sources like Google and Bing as they restrict the amount of transactions you can do within a day. So I made WorldComposer to be able to extract the data, however you can extract large area's and use your own server with streaming solutions.

Nathaniel

 

Hi, I downloaded the 64 bit version of the Search demo, and when I stand still everything looks nice but as soon as I move the camera all the assets are blurred and also gets very choppy when I move.

I tried it again on a much lower resolution but had exactly the same problem. Is anyone else facing this issue?

How do I resolve it? Was hoping to see this is as a good example of what can be accomplished with TC and WC packs.

Thanks

 

Hello,

We use very high resolutions for the demo. You can press 'M' in the demo and disable depth of field and reduce distance and details to make the demo run faster.

Nathaniel

 

Will be in a future version of TC or WC an option to download an example prebuild scene? like the demo scene, with RTP and AFS as well, so for the noob people that bought all the assets will be easer to learn.
I bought all the 4 assets 9 months ago, im a videogame design student and i spent a lot of days, errors and crashes learning the way to achieve a mediocre terrain quality.

 

This is not really possible as I can't include RTP/AFS in a package, also RTP needs to be setup manually for each platform. Learning 4 packages takes some time indeed. TC and WC work fine out of the box as they use standard Unity terrain. But with RTP or AFS in the project, both RTP and AFS need to be setup correctly for the terrain to work correctly, so if they are not setup results from TC and WC look incorrect, which lead into such issues you have. Both RTP and AFS comes with good documentation (RTP has a tutorial video) how to set them up. The easiest way to go is first learn TC and WC, and later import RTP and AFS in your project. And again 1 at the time...

Nathaniel

 

Aw just spended my last bucks on RTP from my limited student money
Would really like to have them though, any chance to get them through the competition? Will get them ASAP else... A bit confused main post says open but last comments from you said closed:/ Soon post my first pics of my first trip through mt rainier!

 

Wow, what an excursion! 155 screens in total:O Sorry couldn't resist...

What about a new, allround skybox?

Over the mountain I went... ​

...discovering the true beauty of the Search...







Of course I visited my good old friend...

Thats it! My journey over mt rainier to the easter egg as well as my entry for the competition

I just have to say my greatest respect to yours, Tom for RTP as well as Nathaniel for the composers and Peter for the demo! this is looking georgious!
Seneral

 

Nathaniel, ok, no problem, im a noob, but im getting good quality results by now with TC WC and RTP (AFS is the next thing hahaha).
Now i have a problem with the grass setup, because i want the healthy tint to be green, not white, and to be rendered as a billboard, but i have and issue with the TC grass settings, because they dont apply at any terrain, i tried removing all the grass, and them setting up again, but dont work.

EDIT: Another thing, the terrain composer settings for the EDITOR and RUNTIME didnt work for me, i see the grass at the same distance everytime :S

 

Hello,

You're looking at the wrong place . Those are the Terrain Maximum settings. You can edit the global grass tint and terrain settings (runtime/editor) in TC terrain list -> Settings.

Nathaniel

 

Can i kiss you very hard?

 

Is this contest (about finding ester egg) is still open?

 

Hello,

No the egg was found...

Nathaniel

 

Ok then , I will enjoy your terrain demo .

 

Is this working on Unity 5 RC1 reasonably well? It doesn't have to be flawless with every bell and whistle, just usable.

 

Nevermind, I see in the asset store description that it does. Buying now, I look forward to making some lake and river scenes for my boat simulator.

 

Yes TerrainComposer/WorldComposer/RTP work very well in the new Unity 5 .

Nathaniel

 

Less deleting posts and reposting, please.

 

I test the demo!

 

Nathaniel, I've asked you this question somewhere before, either YouTube or here somewhere. I've searched but find no sign of it.

All I wanted to know was how to get better ground coverage of grass. When I have attempted it, my grass is sparse. I know you mentioned some setting but I forget, sorry. Could you tell me again please.

Many thanks !

 

Hello,

You can change the grass resolution (it's called detail in Unity) in TC terrain list -> Resolution -> Detail Resolution.

Nathaniel

 

Hello everyone,

Horizon[ON] a great solution to make your terrains look huge and have a great horizon fading towards the sky is finally on the Asset Store now!
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/31861

 

Does this actually do anything to increase the graphical quality of the landscapes possible in Unity 5.0, in other words make higher quality landscapes similar to say, CryEngine. Or is it more for making the same landscapes just more efficiently and faster?

 

Not sure what you are reffering to but Cryengine does not have superior terrains compared to unity, its what they do on top of the terrain which makes it look great(e.g vegetation). If you are using RTP as terrainshader you are at least on par with cryengine. If you are referring to the post above, this is about extending terrains towards the horizon, eg. if you have a terrain that is 1km x 1km it can appear like 100km x 100km(and more) with minimum impact on framerate.

 

Cryengine terrain textures compared to vanilla Unity with the free terrain textures you can get in the asset store seem to have more "pop" to them. If you look at them closely they almost look three dimensional, compared to the wallpaper look of the default unity terrain textures. I am fairly new to Unity and just started playing around with Unity 5 last night after I got back from vacation, so I don't know how to do everything yet.
What I like about Cryengine is also the water feature is great, and the real time day and night cycles and procedural weather you can put in your game. You can also change global lighting and fog settings to make it look like another planet or something.
You are probably wondering why I just don't go with CryEngine, it is because everything else about it doesn't seem very indie/beginner friendly. I cannot figure out how to import stuff from Blender (the third party free addon, CryBlend, just crashes when I try to use it). They seem heavily biased towards Autodesk products I cannot afford right now. That and the lack of documentation. Unreal doesn't appear to have a default underwater system either. If I tried to make my own with the blueprints system I don't even know how to use it would probably look pretty crappy anyway.
So I am thinking if only I could get Unity to get graphics like CryEngine then I would be set. The game I want to make involves at least some scuba diving and being underwater so I would like to have good underwater and graphics quality.
I didn't know about the RTP terrain shader, but that one with this program might do the trick for me if they are compatible with a good water program like the Suimono water asset. .

 

Couldn't find it. This is not quite what I meant.

I mean imagine a square metre and imagine 10 grasses in it. I would like to put 20 grasses or more in it... So basically increase the number of bits of grass, not their detail or resolution..