ats color map ULTRA shader [RELEASED]

The Color Map ULTRA Terrain Shader is a versatile, powerful yet fast replacement for Unity's built in terrain shaders and lets you create beautiful vistas and highly detailed terrain surfaces.

Shader Features V. 3.0
[needs Unity 5.4 and DX11 or OpenGLCore]

• Color Map – Add a manually authored color map to get much more variety on your terrain texturing.
• Up to 8 detail splats within a single pass [including normals, smoothness and height maps – specular is defined as solid color per layer]
• Height based blending – Blend details according to their height maps giving you a much more natural look.
• Multi UV mixing – Get rid of nasty tiling artifacts on high-frequency textures like rock using Multi UV Mixing which is supported on 2 of the 8 layers.
  
• Parallax Mapping or Tessellation – Add more depth to your terrain using parallax mapping or tessellation [beta].
• Dynamic Weather – Add dynamically calculated and fixed snow, water and wetness to your terrain – based on Lux 2.01 snow and wetness functions which also support rain ripples and water running down the surface to add some extra touch.
• Color Painting Tool – Paint to your color map and make adjustments right within unity. Create holes, mask water and snow accumulation or paint puddles and streams.

CMU V.3.0 on the Asset Store | Documentation

Shader Features V. 2.5
[Needs Unity 5.x and support DX9, DX11, OpenGL and OpenGLCore]

• Color Map – Add a manually authored color map to get much more variety on your terrain texturing.
• Up to 6 detail splats within a single pass [including normals and smoothness]
• 2 terrain decals [reusing 2 of the 6 detail textures] blended in using a height map based approach.
• Multi UV Mixing – Get rid of nasty tiling artifacts on high-frequency textures like rock using Multi UV Mixing which is supported on 1 of the 6 layers.
• Mesh blending toolset – which lets you blend any arbitrary mesh seamlessly [texturing and normals] with the terrain.
• Color Painting Tool – Paint to your color map and make adjustments right within unity.

CMU v.2.5 on the Asset Store


Dynamic Weather including dynamic water and snow accumulation [V. 3.0 only]



Crispier surfaces [tessellation is only supported in V. 3.0]



Height based blending [V. 2.5 support height based blending only on decals]



Mesh Blending [V. 2.5 only]

 

This is looking like great work! I'll buy it when it becomes available (assuming my bank likes me at the time).. i may try what you suggested in another thread also and try it on a non-terrain mesh, but eitherway i'll be spending a little time in the near future following some of those world machine videos and making something purty to see what it can do

 

hi lazygunn,
thanks. i will keep you informed when it becomes available.

lars

 

Great shader, should be built into unity will get it once it hits the store, thanks for making this!

 

your are welcome ;-)
i hope it will be approved today: let’s see.

lars

 

the only visible thing that I noticed in the web player is that detail pops in when zooming in and out far away.
I don't know if this is the terrain mesh, or the texture quality that causes this sudden pop but this is quite visible, maybe good if there is some way to blend between this ?

 

i guess, it is the fading (on rock texture?) between the two multi uv texture samples.
usually the fading it rather smooth and not very noticeable but as the camera in the webplayer is very fast you can definitely see it…

lars

 

hi there,

Shader has been released
Get it here:http://u3d.as/content/forst/ats-colormap-ultra-terrain-shader/3tU

lars

 

You have my money, great job! I'll try get something fancy done (between doing other things) with it soon then maybe it can shift a few extra units

 

i hope you will enjoy it.

lars

 

Hi - Does this work with Unity (b11)?

 

you mean unity 4 b11?
i have not tested it, but it should – although it is not optimized for 4.0.
things should be much easier there…

lars

 

hi there,

i am working on a second demo terrain – and this is the first preview.
[open in new tab/window to see in full size]



using the rock texture as decal to redefine edges:





i hope you like it,

lars

 

Cool?, can we see a web player?

 

hi sevenbits,

not convinced?
i have only worked one 0.001% of the terrain but of course you can have a web player:
http://bit.ly/R7g2EE

lars

 

Beautiful !

 

thanks.
and i have to admit: i like it too ;-)

lars

 

How does this differ/work with from the Terrain Decals you released recently?

 

the color map Ultra shader is more complex (and more expensive to render) than the decal shader.
if you just paint the terrain using unity’s built in terrain tools then probably the decal shader is the right one for you.
if you want to use a color map and use decals mainly just to add more variation to the edges between the textures – in this case the color map ultra shader is the right one for you.

color map Ultra shader supports:
* 1 overall colormap
* 1 overal normal map for the whole terrain
* 6 detail tetxtures (bump mapped)
* 2 detail textures (bump mapped) reused and blended as decals

decal shader supports:
* 4 detail textures
* 2 independent decals (bump mapped)
* 2 detail textures (bump mapped) reused and blended as decals


lars

 

you're a wizard.

Purchased!

 

Just FYI everything works perfectly in Unity 4 I can confirm, only difference is you don't need to override the inbuilt shader you can call it whatever you want, create a blank material with your shader selected and set that as the terrain material and everything works perfectly. (It may even be possible to expose the other values to the material that you are setting in script and make the script a lot lot simpler)

 

ive spent the day messing around with world machine and this shader and i can honestly say it looks better than id even hoped when everythings set up nicely, looks phenomenal, great work lars

i might have to point out to readers of this thread that if you're working on terrains at all you'd have to be crazy not to get this, its really quite something, at less than 10 euros that instantly puts unity's terrain into a fair shout with 'bigger' engines? crazy, unity should be paying this guy

i'll get some screenshots of my work up when i'm happy with them

 

Lars, I was looking to extend your shader ever so slightly and I just need one free color channel to do it. Obviously you've maxed out the texture samplers so on looking at the shader I noticed the color map does not do anything with the alpha channel. However on looking at your demo files the color map for the example scene has a very intricate alpha map, looks like a flowmap. Just wanted to double check this is not being used anywhere?

Many thanks, having a lot of fun with this so far

 

That's great! This would make it possible to combine the shader exports, no? So then you could use multiple of Lars's shaders per project. Fantastic!

 

SevenBits, it allows you to convert the 'hacked' monobehaviour approach to changing shader values into a totally legitimate shader with all properties exposed to a material. No need for forcing shader globals any more, now you can have as many materials as you like with lars' shader. All with different settings for all the textures and colors etc can use em all in the same scene on different terrains if that's what you want.
It's a pretty simple process to convert, just expose all the variables that are being set in the cs file in shaderlab then your good to attach it to a blank material and start setting it up. Then set your terrain to use that material and everything works like magic.

I've sent my shader converted to Lars so he may include it in an update if he wishes

 

thanks!

 

hi quickfingers,

the alpha channel of the color map is not used in the shader (it only samples rgb) so you can use this channel for whatever you want: overall specularity, dynamic destruction or to cut holes into the terrain… if i ever add snow to this shader this might be the slot where the "snow shadows" would be stored.

what would you store in the channel? i am really interested as i had no really useful idea so far.


lars

 

thanks! i will have a look into it and probably publish an update soon.

lars

 

Ah, I see. Okay.

 

Purchased and actually i think i'm gonna switch back to unity terrain in the end now that i have this, or use both at the same time depending on target.
Are the assets free to use in our games too? I like those detail textures.

 

Lars have you been thinking on adding tree and grass masks like Frostbite engine has? Or maybe adding realtime destruction or deformation?

Just laying out some future ideas how you could improve terrain....

 

hi janpec,

i have not been thinking about tree or grass masks yet as you can already import those using toms terrain tools.
same with real time destruction which has already been implemented by some guy, even several times if i remember it right. …leaving aside the fact that destruction does not only affect the shader.

but there are lot of things like snow or rain and puddles that could come to the color map shader in future versions.

right now it is a multi purpose solution supporting forward and deferred lighting, lightmaps and projectors. dropping some of this features (e.g. only supporting real time lighting) might push the boundaries a little bit further.
and of course you already can adjust it to fit your needs (like Quickfingers has done to support holes in the terrain).

as far as the terrain system as a whole is concerned: i think unity should and probably will really come up with something completely new.

lars

 

You skiped my question
Can i use the detail textures that are part of the package commercially?

 

It's probably best to use a private message for this.

 

I'd disagree, this is a question on the asset and it's not specific to me, since the textures are really nice i think others may want to make sure before including it in their projects.

 

i guess ronan is right, and i really apologize for being so late answering this question.

and as i am very short of time at the moment i do not even have a satisfying answer yet:
working on the ultra shader i just took the best fitting textures from my personal archive which should be mostly free of any copyrights – mostly, i have to admit, because it is a heavy mix of own photography, free and public domain texture sources and some crysis and skyrim mods.
so i spent quite a while already looking through different hard drives to find the original source of each texture in the package.
it still will take some time to get everything cleared and i might even have to replace some textures in case i can not reproduce the original source.
so until then i just would ask you to take the package as a plain shader.

even if this means some extra work for me i thank ronan for pointing this out.

lars

 

Although I have not purchased the package than you for pointing this out. That should make everything clear.

 

Thanks for the info, i'll wait for an update.
If you find out they're not royalty free could you try and track where the rock and the flower detail textures came from? I'd love to licence them.
(And if they're royalty free and you're allowed to re licence them in this way, omg up the price it's already cheap for the shader alone . . .)

 

hi ronan,

you can definitely use the rock detail texture, but what do you mean with "flower detail" texture?
there isn’t any in the package…

lars

 

Sorry you're right, i only looked for afar and some of the white dots i had guessed to be flowers.
The textures i like are 02 forest, 03 rock if you can check for those 2 (well you actually already answered for one).
I'm still interested in all of them but i can very much live with only having an answer on those 2.

 

forest: go for it. no issues with that.

lars

 

Great thanks! Was already a steal for the shader, now i'm just feeling guilty

 

great! i hope you enjoy it.
and share your experience and some pics of what you have done with it – please.
that might help me selling the shader ;-) but also will encourage people jump into the discussion i hope.

lars

 

Will be a while before i can share anything just started on a very large WM project that will like span a couple hundred of nodes and am thinking of renting a very large server to render it, i'll be lucky if i have anything non low-res to show in the coming monthes

 

I'm hoping to have something to show quite soon, i've aleady made a terrain with some very pretty elements thanks to the colourmap but due to my own inexperience some of the terrain itself was quite ugly and not how i'd like to represent the shader. I'm trying a new approach to creating a colourmap today, i hope, that should be quite fun, using dreamscape/max/vray/substances that with any luck will give a very nice high fidelity look, and if not, i'll try something else, but i'll certainly have something to show eventually.

 

Just a quick bump in case you have private message notifications disabled, sent you a private message yesterday.

 

hi there,

i have just sent an updated version of the shader to the asset store.
it now supports unity 4.x natively (and unity 3.x of course) which gives you the possibility to easliy setup multiple terrains within one scene – just read the readme file. Many thanks to quickfingers!
some detail textures have changed also, so everything should be cleared now.

lars

 

So this ultra shader is a super set of the decal shader? Dang, I bought the decal shader when it was released, and it's obselete already.

 

hi imtrobin,

the decal shader is not obsolete at all and there are quite some reasons to use it:
1. it is faster to render and uses less texture memory
2. it gives you "real" decals supporting a user defined height map hence better blending
3. in case you do not use external tools to create color and splat maps it fits better with unity’s built in terrain painting system and is much more intuitiv to use

lars

 

Hi Lars, Is it possible to add the normalmaps to detail objects?
For example, - I would like to do a stony plain and add a million little stone, like grass, but with normalmap?