ats color map ULTRA shader [RELEASED]

Well what I found that my bugs might be related to Unity bugs. I used unity 5.0.0 and it seems like it did not updated my scene correctly, when i patched unity. I am experiencing tons of graphical issues so I am about making a new scene and put my game into clean coat. But i am not sure what is related to this shader and what is related to unity graphic bugs. So as someone said he has same bugs as me. Now I am having problems sometimes it shouts at me that i exceeded maximum number of 2D samplers and terrain become pink, but after several restarts it is OK again. SSAO does stripe artifacts. Grass textures resolution drops to like maximum 64x64 pixels, trees has camera background artifacts and so... I feel very depressed about the list of bugs, which are not my fault I guess. And fps is f***** low ( 5-7fps with only terrain and few(like 50 onto whole terrain) trees and skybox - everything 1k res) so... I think all is related to unity 5.0.0 because when I started new scene, it seems it works correctly. I will inform you after I move whole project

 

hello Lars,

when I wanted to use a global normal map - I need to disable GI first, right? - can you point out, how to do this in Unity 5.1x? do I have to modify the shader code?!

best regards

 

you have to edit the shader and add "nodynlightmap" to the #pragma line to free one texture sampler
if you do not want/need gi on any shader you can disable gi in the lighting settings:
disable "Precomputted Realtime GI" (<-- crazy name btw!) and "Baked GI".

 

aaaahhh, great !!! Thanks a lot

 

A question regarding the shader, is it working fully as intended in Unity 5.2.x? I get weird artifacts related to the splatted normals (I disabled normals in the shader to verify) and I cannot see where the problem stems from. In short, they seem way to strong, as if if one normal map takes over and dictates the overall result in comparison to the others. See the enclosed pic where the splatted normals show up in a low-res pattern (the splat map is relatively low res here) where some spots simply gets very dark due to a strong normal map.

The shader code is quite hard to follow since it is not commented (much) and you seem to have been edited it a bit (lots of commented parts and left-over bits from pre-5 I presume).

Any hints regarding how to fix this? Thanks in advance!

 

Another couple of images that illustrate the problem. Same area, at distance and close up.

 

@Foxxis: last version was committed using unity 5.02. but as it is a surface shader unity should take care off all changes regarding rendering in unity 5.2.x.
and i just imported the project in unity 5.2.1f1 – everything looked fine.

 

I am using this in 5.2.2 and it is working great. Could be a splatmap problem @Foxxis . I had this happen recently when using a PSD splatmap. An issue with the 4th texture so the alpha of the splatmap. Was doing this with the normal terrain shader though.

 

This is the third splat and specifically Advanced UV Blending as far as I can tell. If I omit repacking normalsplat3, the problem disappears (but the normal map gets flipped incorrectly). I did suspect the splatmap to be the culprit, but I cannot find an error. Will take another look in the morning, but any insight would be weldome. TIA!

 

Alright. That is all I could think of. Let me know how it goes.

 

I have gone over the splat map code (we generate it dynamically) and as far as I can tell there should be no problem that would cause this. I "normalize" the control channels (ie, the combined value of all channels must be <1) and have take steps to eliminate weird values.

It looks as if the problem occurs at the borders between different normal maps. I have checked the source normal maps and they are fine.

It does not only affect normal maps though, it appears as if for one splat map the color correction is incorrectly done as well and is impossible to rectify.

 

How does it look with a new terrain using the Standard shader? There is a script and description at the bottom of this page that will let you apply a splatmap without ats:

https://www.world-machine.com/learn.php?page=workflow&workflow=wfunity

Load in all the textures and paint a circle anywhere on the terrain with every texture so it will create the splatmaps. Then select the splatmap and replace it using the script linked above.

 

Sorry for forgetting to update the thread when I solved the issue. As it turns out the problem was that we elected to compress the dynamically generated splatmaps to save some memory. The compression errors lead to harsh transitions between various splatted normals, which in turn resulted in artifacts when the terrain was rendered.
Simply leaving the splats uncompressed in memory removed all problems.

Thanks for the help and suggestions!

 

Hello Lars, Im considering buying this amazing shader but I cannot seem to figure out how exactly this one works and couldnt find any tutorial. Im very new to Unity so sorry for newbie questions. So my workflow is like the following: I create a terrain from a preset in Geocontrol. Then I save the heightmap in .raw and texturized terrain image in .png\.bmp\whatever. Next, I go to Unity and import the RAW I have to generate a terrain and apply your script. The global map is my texturized terrain image, right? What's the next step? Where should I get a colormap? How many colors on the color map it should be (can I use red-green-blue map to texturize my terrain with 6 different textures)?

Sorry again for these newbie questions, I just guess you need to publish some kind of a step-by-step tutorial.
P.S.: here's the messed up tutorial of one guy whose shader seems to do something similar: http://kostiantyn-dvornik.blogspot.ru/2013/11/awesome-unity-texturing-terrain-tutorial.html
In this post he makes the color map in Geocontrol. I can do the same but still - how many textures a script will use to apply textures according to such a map?

 

okay I've noticed the .rtf manual is included into this bundle, I'll stick to it. One short question I have left - do I understand correctly that normally I would add a fully painted heightmap + 3 detailed textures to the script? Plus a color map that controls how these detailed textures are distributed around the terrain. Is that correct?

 

HI,

By heightmap I guess u mean the greyscale heightmap of your terrain. Without that - u have flat terrain.

Detail textures define the textures u apply onto the terrain, eg grass, sand. You can have more than 3 ... check in the doc. You can have up to 6 if you like. You will probably want normal maps for those as well, which you combine in the editor to save resources.

There is a colormap and a splatmap. I think you confused them.

A ColorMap is only used to apply color. So it applies the colors over the terrain textures. This way you can use it to break up terrain textures that repeat a lot and/or make interesting areas etc. It's like a color tint - like if you sprayed colors over your terrain. It's optional. There is also a script to "paint" colors yourself - ie create your own and/or edit the existing one

The Splatmap defines how the terrain textures are applied and blended onto the terrain. If you have up to 4 terrain textures you only need 1 colormap - each will use the R, G, B, and A channels to define how strong to apply the terrain texture.
If you use more than 4 it gets trickier as you then (might) need a 2nd splatmap. I say (might) as the 2nd is optional. It can be tricky making 2, as the sum of all color channel values across both splatmaps must be 1. As a new user I suggest you don't create 2 (unless you have a tool that calculates them) even if you use 6 terrain textures - so just mix the first 4 terrain textures, then use the unity terrain paint tools like brush to apply the 5th and 6th texture where you want them.

You can also have another 2 texture details as 'decals' ... but these are repeat of 2 of the 6 ... see doc.

Enjoy

 

Yep I understand this theory behind (or at least I think I do), but when it comes to actually designing...

Look, I'll make it simpler so you wouldn't have to guess what I'm doing wrong. After half night of failing I just created new terrain and started following this guide by Lars:

My steps are like the following:
1) import raw to create a landscape
2) add 4 debug textures - green, red, blue and black
3) add custom terrain script
4) add color and normal maps
5) press 'play'.
The thing is even this super-basic setup doesn't work for me. The map is entirely green (1st texture).
Color map is read\write enabled, RGB 24bit.
Normal map generated from it by Unity.
Any help?
Sorry for bothering with these lame questions, I've played with demo scene, changed detail textures to debug solid colors and SOMEHOW they updated on the scene, blended with it. I just cannot figure how, seems like I do everything exactly like in docs but...

 

Well,as we can't "see" what you are doing wrong, we have to guess.

between step 4 and 5 above, did you generate the new material and apply it?

It works, and it works well. So there is just something you are missing. I used his included word doc help file the first time, and still use it when i need some help.

 

have you seen the video? There's nothing about material there. And it was shooted by Lars himself so I kinda trust his order of steps I know you have to generate a material, unless you do so Unity will use the default one. I've read the doc before asking, trust me. But even with the default shader the script is able to make splat map work - distribute assigned textures. And it takes the first one only.

Anyway, I somehow managed to fix that, started everything over again and it somewhat worked. My best bet is that Geocontrol saved my splatmap wrong, with alpha as a transparency. Had to check the splatmap.psd from demo scene to figure out how channels should be arranged. I have one final issue there. Here's the screenshot of what I currently have.


Looks pretty good. When you look at this angle. However, when I'm very close to the terrain, I have regions of two textures blending and it naturally looks like water (see the 2nd image). The upper texture 'slides' above the bottom one. Coupled with terrain glow, it looks like water indeed.

Here you can see the green bottom of the lake with light areas (sand texture) flow above it How can I fix that?

 

No, I didn't watch video, I didn't need to - doc worked for me.

Glad it's working for you.
Obviously like everyone else, now you will need to do some tweaking by playing with parameters (and values in RGBA channels) to improve it. Blending and sharpness is controlled by the splatmap. You might try use unity brush and paint a 100% strong texture in a line then see how that displays - to see if its the blending.

Enjoy

 

Yep the doc is nice, I just happened to find that video prior to buying the asset, so this kinda messed up things for me a bit

thanks, I will give it a try. However, that's not exactly blending that causes this issue. Textures are blended perfectly well, it's just the bottom grass detail tex for some reason having this weird glow effect.

I understand I can modify the splat map to change how textures are distributed across the terrain. I've turned off everything possible including MultiUV blending and paralax, of course tried to reduce elevation and shininess for textures, tried to play around with terrain material settings. Maybe someone can give a hint where to look for the required setting rather than randomly change all of them or repaint ARGB splat map.

UPD: here's another close-up of the issue

 

the video is outdated. please stay to the docs.

 

Hello, sorry for not responding, been messing up with Horiz[ON]

I figured out what causes the issue - an incredibly large size of texture2. I've set it to 12x12 and everything looks gorgeous even at close-ups. However, I've encountered another issue. Please advise and most likely, I wont bother you again

After I've reduced texture size, it (as one could certainly expect) gives me an awfully tiled terrain - see the image.

I've double-checked the demo and the doc. I've read about the multi UV feature. But it is only applied to texture #3, and my tiled texture is texture #2. In demo every one of 8 textures are set to small sizes, however, there are no regions that look so cloned.

Lars, can you please clarify what techniques you used to avoid such an effect when all terrains are set to extremely small sizes? In your demo you have grass texture 8x8 size, rock texture 6x6 size, multi UV is off, and still it doesn't look this awful checkmate field way. I currently use only 4 textures distributed according to one splat map, no decals or custom textures painted above. Is this possible to fix that without adding 4 more textures and blending them with 4 initial ones?

Thank you.

 

@meoh: you have to use optimized detail textures which have reduced tiling artifacts – which in your case would mean: reduce the contrast within your textures and get rid of very prominent details within them.
and you do not save anything not using all available 6 detail textures (apart from some memory) as the shader draws everything within a single draw call.

lars

 

Hi, thanks for the reply, you help to newbies is unvaluable I really appreciate this. I've been using test textures from your demo asset, but okay, will try reducing texture contrast as you've told. I just don't quite get this part:

what did you mean by not saving anything? I doubt I would use all 6 textures managed by the shader, since that requires two splat maps. And creating the second one is quite tricky, compared to the first one (I just use shader colors in Geocontrol to red, green and blue). I honestly have no idea how to draw it So did you mean using less than all 6 textures will anyway be somewhat not that great?

 

you can use the built in terrain painting tools to add detail texture 5 and 6 (e.g. to just add some very nice details or break up tiling).
and using only 4 detail textures of course reduces memory consumption (no 2nd splat map, no additional detail textures) but it does not speed up the shader: it is always single pass (unlike the built in terrain shaders).

 

Ah, I got it. Nope Im not trying to save anything, it's just a bit tricky ATM to get how it's all working, not speaking about painting the 2nd splat map Im not intended to save any resources.

I guess all my troubles come from using wrong splat maps - I dont wanna buy PS just for that, so I guess I have to figure out how to do that in GIMP Btw, when I checked your sample demo splat maps, GIMP channel dialog showed that R G and B channels are visible, Alpha is set to invisible and filled with solid red. I'm a bit confused with that because in the beginning of this thread you were explaining how to paint 4 channels for mud-grass-rock-sand. And for sand we need a mask in our Alpha channel. So while I'm okay with painting masks for R, G and B channels, I'm in a loss what should I do for Alpha. Sigh, well, I guess it's more about working with image editors rather than your asset

 

I use Gimp, and u can do all.
For simplicity, decode and encode works well to work with 4 individual color channels as greyscales.

 

Hello Lars after a long time of happily enjoying your asset I have to write you again... I have started to do some optimalisations and began with lightmap baking. Everything is OK when I have lights Baking on realtime... but when I change to mixed or baked (basicaly when I bake terrain), these errors occured which does not make any sense what is wrong and also could not google them... So i decided to make new scene and try it there and same result. So I am not sure why baking does not like your shader or your material... I tried all possible combination of settings and all went bad. The results after baking differs in these 2 screenshots baked/realtime. I was trying to solve this whole day. I found that the error with template is fixed in newest version of unity (I am using 5.2.1). Terrain without ats works fine...
thanks

 

Oh great, can you please tell me how do you edit your alpha channel? It has to contain mask for texture #4 right? I'm asking because it seems you can do it in two ways:
#1: Alpha displayed in the main channel dialog. This is actually a real alpha transparency channel. And it seems you cannot modify it.

#2: 'Alpha' is simply the 4th additional channel, GIMP does not consider it as a transparency channel (when you right-click your layer, it will suggest 'Add Alpha Channel'. You can paint it as you want and change its fill opacity from 0 to 100.

So it's kinda confusing what should one use.

My workflow is like the following: I have a color map as my basic layer. Then I use Fuzzy Select Tool to select areas with similar colors (say, ground = red, grass=green and rock=blue) and fill each with red, green, blue in separate layers. And then comes the confusion how to create a proper 4th alpha channel. I'm currently trying every possible approach, but certainly this takes way too long to figure out what's the right way...

 

UPD: Here's what I meant by confusion in regards to alpha channel. I just re-imported the ATS asset and reopened the splat map used in this demo. Here's what it looks like in GIMP:

As you can see, there's no alpha channel at all. The channel that is called 'Alpha' is simply a custom channel, filled with solid red. When this channel toggled visible, the entire image is painted as 255-0-0. So basically, Lars, your demo does not use alpha channel splat maps? So why docs insist we should use ARGB? And not only docs, the shader itself prohibits using the splat without 4th channel... Moreover, the splat map is imported as 'Automatic Truecolor'. This does not make sense to me at all... If there's no alpha channel, what happens to the 4th texture (sand and rocks in demo)? Nothing? It's never used?

 

@Kusras lightmapping works fine for me – even in unity 5.2.1.
although it is not practical at all as trees (tested with speed trees) do not cast shadows nor do they get lit properly.
so lightmapping gets more or less worthless.

lars

 

@meoh: the "customsplatmap__flippedvertical_argb" uses only the rgb channels, alpha i set to zero, right.
but if you look for the terrain used in the demo scene within the project tab ("ColormapUltraTerrain") and open its foldout (right click "reimport" if you can’t see the foldout) you will find that the terrain has 2 splat maps and both uses all channels.
so what i did for the demo:
- i imported and assigned the "original" splat map: "customsplatmap__flippedvertical_argb" which only defines the distribution of the first 3 detail textures.
- then painted detail 4, 5 and 6 as well as the decals using the built in painting tool.

lars

 

Hi Meoh,

Gimp is very powerful and many ways to do this, i just suggested one simple way (to avoid masks which some battle with), ie. ...

Decompose / Compose an image into seperate layers for its color channels. Then work on each layer, and recompose it. Or make a new one by composing 4 greyscale layer images into one RGBA

Here's an image ...
#

Decompose it to Layers ...
Colors>Components>Decompose...

in this image theres RGB channels, but splatmap u have 4 channel

bingo ... now u can work with 3 (or 4) seperate greyscale images...


This is also very easy to build a splatmap from 4 greyscale image

 

@mwituni - great, thank you Will try that.

@larsbertram1 yeah sure I've seen the 2nd splat map in demo, I just try working without it.

One quick question - what settings should I use to get rid of 'shiny' textures? My scene keeps looking like after a jungle rain, especially rocks. I've missed specularity values somewhere deep within shader settings?

 

there is a general spec color in the shader set up as well as smoothness in the alpha channel of each detail texture.

 

General spec color is set to black, spec multiplier is 0 but I've forgot about alpha texture channels indeed, damn.. Thanks

 

I'm curious if this asset supports tri-planar shading?

 

---------------------------------------------
Hello, I have a problem with shader.
It's pink.
Problem, I guess, is in this string which I found in shader's Inspector:
"Too many texture interpolators would be used for ForwardBase pass (11 out of max 10)"
What can I do with that?
---------------------------------------------
Selfanswer:
I had to edit the code by replacing #pragma target 3.0 to #pragma target 4.0
Finally it works!

 

I have multiple tiles. All went well on tile 1 then... since then I have been trying to work out if this supports multiple tiles. I have made new materials, new color maps but now nothing seems to work. Could you let me know if this supports multiple tiles and if so how I implement it?

Update; OK - I'm getting there: I assume that you duplicate the material for each tile. Only problem is I can't seem to copy the splat maps so have ended up with 2 terrains sharing a splat map! Its a bit frustrating as this is half way to looking quite good!

I had copied the colormap component from one terrain to another. Seems this caused the issue.

 

I've had this asset for a while, but never got it going because it requires global colormap and global normal map and I just never had the tools to generate those. I should now be able to generate them using Terrain Composer (I hope), so I'm going to be giving this another shot. However, I am also looking at Unistorm for my time of day and weather system and I see that it uses your ats snow suite to do snow buildup. The question I have is, does Unistorm with the ats snow shader work well with colormap ultra?

 

The tutorial video shows that you need to duplicate the terrain in order to get detail textures 5, 6, and the decals on 7 and 8. Is that a technical limitation of Unity that makes the duplicate terrain a requirement? It just seems a bit complicated to get that part set up and the workflow is somewhat confusing.

 

@larsbertram1
I just upgraded our project to 5.33 from 5.22, and the tiling on the terrain object changed drastically. Did something change between 5.2->5.3 and has the shader been upgraded to remain compatible? Thanks in advance.

 

Also, 5.3 throws a shader error:
Shader error in 'Hidden/TerrainEngine/Details/Vertexlit': variable 'c' used without having been completely initialized at Assets/Advanced Foliage Shader v2.042/Shaders/Includes/FoliageLightingTerrainEngine.cginc(52) (on glcore)

Compiling Vertex program with DIRECTIONAL SHADOWS_OFF LIGHTMAP_OFF DIRLIGHTMAP_OFF DYNAMICLIGHTMAP_OFF
Platform defines: UNITY_ENABLE_REFLECTION_BUFFERS UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF1 UNITY_SPECCUBE_BOX_PROJECTION UNITY_SPECCUBE_BLENDING SHADER_API_DESKTOP UNITY_TEXTURE_ALPHASPLIT_ALLOWED

 

Never mind the shader error, that was from AFS which we no longer use. Deleting it has no effect on the tiling problem of what looks to be the multi-uv pass. It is now extremely upscaled compared to in U5.2x. It works well on a normal mesh though, but not on the terrain object. So it would appear somehow incompatible with the terrain in 5.3?

 

I would be guessing this is due to falling back to Nature/Terrain/Diffuse and the shader not being compatible with the new fallback shader?

 

NVM, not a shader problem. The normal maps lost their "generate mip maps" check on upgrade. Do not ask me why. That messed up the normal mapping and gave the appearance of a tiling problem.

 

Wrong...it is a shader/Terrain engine conflict.

In 5.3 certain shader names will now reference the internal terrain textures and shaders no matter what you do. The worst result of this is if you attempt to assign splat maps at runtime to the material. They will then be overridden by the internal splat maps stored by the terrain. So in order to get dynamic splatting to work in 5.3.3 you have to change the shader member names (_Control for example will refer to the native terrain splat map, not the one stored on the material).
Maybe that is by design and intended earlier (to get the shader to use the info on the terrain rather than relying on the maps on the material itself), but in 5.3 it will interfere with real time us whereas in 5.2.x it did not. Why I do not know.
It will still work in 5.3.3 if you paint your terrains using the normal terrain system, but splatting at runtime will fail unless you edit the shader.

By the way, is this shader still maintained? No reply to emails nor replies in this thread... and the shader has not been touched since last summer...?

 

The last reply in this thread by the dev - @larsbertram1 - was in January.

Maybe he isn't getting forum notifications? It happens.

 

I emailed him directly as well using the details on the asset store page, but no reply. The developer website links to the official page for some town in Germany, so I am starting to think this is abandonware. Either way it looks bad to enter a rogue link as your dev web page.

Anyway, we have modified the system fairly heavily as well, but having someone to bounce ideas with would have been good.

As it stands, our modified shader works for our use but if anyone is doing runtime stuff with it, see my post above and take special care in renaming the member names if you want the shader to override basic terrain splatting fully.