Adding detail texture to terrain

I have a diffuse type material added to my terrain no problem. How would I go about making a detail texture?

The only way I can think of doing it is having another material assigned to the terrain that has a texture with an alpha map and a small scale.

I was going to use the one that is in the SAL under the Desert material, and then go about making one of my own.

Would a Bumped style shader work better?

Thanks!
-Jon

 

You can certainly try it. Personally I prefer a normal detail map, but some people (like NVidia) are raving about that way of doing terrains.

The nice thing about bumpmaps is that you can do that with the version of Unity you have now - use the bumpscale parameter to scale up your bumpmap.

Play around. You can make bumpmaps fade out just like with traditional detail textures (from the texture import settings).

 

Does Unity support Maya multitexturing?

For those reading this post, but unfamiliar with the concept, multitexturing allows you have different UVW coordinate/tiling info for each of the textures in the same material. It's a very useful technique for doing shadowmaps. Maya does a great job of letting you create multitextured materials.

 

Not in the way you're talking about, unfortunately... You can do multitexturing in shaders (the detail shader does this), but we only support getting 1 UV set on the models.

 

Are detail textures available in Unity now? If so, how do you use them? I looked in the manual, but there was only a brief mention.

If I understand correctly, a detail texture is a secondary texture which is displayed when the viewer gets close to a model. This provides more detail and hides the blurriness of the main texture.

I have a terrain model which is split into various polygon selections. The main selections define my cliffs and use a large texture, tiling it along the x axis. This creates a nice effect but I'd love to be able to apply a detail texture so the player sees this when they get very close.

Any help on how to achieve this is much appreciated.

 

Yes they are in theory - if you look at the pop-up list of shaders (in a material component) you will see one of them is called "DiffuseDetail". This gives the option of a primary mapped image and a "detail" image. However I didn't have much success in getting it to work. I could see the detail image being applied in the free scene view (texture mode), but it didn't seem to appear in the game view (been meaning to post about this for a while).

Richard.

 

Sheeesh - not working all weekend!

Actually I am not terraining at the moment so not in a hurry. I will double check to see if I can get it working tho.

Richard.

 

Thanks. I'll try this out and see what happens.

 

I have used Detail Shaders no problem on my Radeon 9200... do you perhaps have a GeForce 2 MX or something similar? They weren't working on there at the time I tried... I think I filed a bug report on that.

Try placing the Ground from Standard Assets/Meshes into your scene, then selecting the actual Ground object and changing the shader to the detail shader from Diffuse. Then use the same texture map as the diffuse one as the detail, but set the scale of the detail one to 4,4.

That works for me. Check that you have Pixel Lights on in Render Settings. I can post a before/after picture if anyone wants one.

Cheers,
-Jon

 

Mmmm...OK - it seems to be working fine now - not sure what was happening last time.

thanks,
Richard.

 

Please post a before after pic for me to stare at Jeff

 

Here is a before/after from the ground object in the Physics Demo project. The detail is the same as the main texture, except 1/4 the size. (A scale of 4)

-Jon