► Beast ◄

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Voxel shader techique, with build in vertex ambient occlusion
an other lighting effects.

 

Assuming that the name Beast is related to a famous Unity 4 lightmapper not compatible now with Unity 5... this new Beast is not a lightmapper but a TERRAIN 2.0!!!... a very detailed, configurable, deformable terrain like no other... with amazing snow surface effect... now in the store we have only a surface deformable that we apply over the terrain and is quite ok, but deforming the terrain itself is much more powerful... and with that amazing detail Beast will overtake every terrain!!!
For my current project what I need over all is an AAA terrain like Beast and when I saw the first video for me was a daydream!

 

Arkhivrag please tell us what is ?

 

Great tease! So it's DEFINITELY not the most advanced footprint system ever devised?

I vote terrain deformation shader as well.

 

Basemap Extrapolated Advanced Shaded Terrain. (If not a real thing then well, it should be)

EDIT: Oh ya, that also works seamlessly with GAIA.

 

lol, its ur mom... jk

 

Textures.

 

Submitted for review.




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For the past two weeks everyone's been like:


@Arkhivrag has anybody get it right?

Can't wait!

 

i think it high resolution recorder tool

 

Can you tell us what it is now please?

 

A tesselation shader.

 

You win!

 

And @ZJP was right... again DLLs

 

Wow, package went through review process in less than 24 hours, usually it needs more then 2 weeks.



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What optimisations are there? how easy is it it to extend to be used with our own shaders? DLL, no source?

 

By decision of GRNG (google random number generator) the contest winner is @keenanwoodall




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No dlls, its just a shader.
Everything inside cginc file.



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Very nice, are there any optimisations such as fall off and so on?

 

Three type of tessellators: fixed, distance based and edge length.




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I am really thinking about to get this the next days, but which purpose do those two included DLLs serve then?

 

Those are editor dlls, containing some editor and version controlling elements.



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Hey it's the winner here! Just wanted to say thanks for the keys. Can't wait to check out Beast!

 

How is this better than simply using a normal map with your shader?

EDIT: People in the future will be very confused by the comments on the first page when this asset is released.

 

So it's only useful if you want to use a depth texture without a normalmap?
It can be handy for runtime generated content, but performance must be worse than using a depth texture + normal map for regular meshes.
The video is cool, but I don't see this as revolutionary as the video implies...

 

It does look really nice, but TerraFirma is going to have this same capability as well and it's far more than just this singular feature. This is a hard sell when put up against that competition.

 

Using normal map still requires mesh with correct tangents, so if you have e.g. standard plane and do displace using shader, what happens with mesh normals and tangents? - Nothing. They are not modified and do not reflect displace effect. As a result bad light interaction, with or without normalmap.
Beast has such a good visual results because it handles normal/tangent calculation inside tessellation pass.


How costly it is (performance)?
I use the same method in Curved World that has fantastic speed even on mobiles, but Beast is targeting high-end devices with SM5/Tessellation and you have no worry about performance, its very fast.



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I'm so happy that I wanted to share my first minute with Beast. Just a plane and ground textures from Terrain Composer.
Thank you for this asset man!!!

 

Can I ask a different question. I would love to integrate this into my third person game because I believe it can make certain things very realistic. But the biggest problem I've always had with tessellation shaders is the fact that I really cannot IK my character's feet to match the displacement.

Any recommendations on how you would make an approach to that with beast ?

 

Looks amazing, any chance you can include a TriPlanar version of the shader for terrains? Procedural terrain generation is always in need of better triplanar shaders.

 

Displace is done inside shader and it is completely invisible to the Physics engine that can be used for 'feet to match the displacement'. You will have to generate MeshCollider or use some other technique.



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Added to a WishList.



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Absolutely right.

 

You sell Beast for $10 and Fragmentum for $199?

 

Has anyone tried this with VR yet? Normal mapping typically doesn't work as well in VR (Google it, there are a ton of references. Here's one from oculus.), and this looks like it could potentially solve that issue.

 

lol. $199 for a tool that deconstructs a mesh into triangles? Um...yeah.

 

It's a special price to minimize asset selling before new version release (unfortunately I can not temporarily disable asset or hide it from the store).



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Makes sense then.

 

Hi, like this very much,could you recommend a way how to make change the tessellation image dynamically at runtime, is that possible?

 

Is this shader plays well with enlighten? The standard tessellation shader produces all kind of artifacts with when the lights are baked.

 

so noob question - does this replace or work in concert with something like RTP?

 

Here is quick test with baked lightmaps:




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If you are asking about terrain shaders, no, currently it does not include terrain shaders.



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Fantastic, thank you!

 

I see - so in the example vid, is that a terrain converted to a mesh? I'm trying to understand what the procedure/requirements would be to get something like the video.

 

After playing around with it for a while I really like it, however I would like to request some features(sorry in advance for the lack of proper terminology). Most tessellation shaders have the option to set the direction, without this feature you have to edit the files\position of the object which sucks. There is this thing called "phong smoothing", that's cool, I would love to see it in this shader as well(it's not as important as the direction tho). And this probably not going to happen, but could you do something about the cracks on smoothing groups\UV shells?

 

Snow scene in the promo video uses only Unity built-in plane mesh with Beast shader and textures from here. Nothing more.



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Need to make research about Phong smoothing and Vector displace.
As for normal smoothing script below can help:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. void Start()
3. {
4.     Mesh mesh = GetComponent<MeshFilter>().mesh;
5.  
6.     Dictionary<Vector3, Vector3> smoothNormalsHash = new Dictionary<Vector3, Vector3>();
7.     for (int i = 0; i < mesh.vertexCount; i++)
8.     {
9.         Vector3 key = mesh.vertices[i];
10.  
11.         if (smoothNormalsHash.ContainsKey(key))
12.             smoothNormalsHash[key] = (smoothNormalsHash[key] + mesh.normals[i]).normalized;
13.         else
14.             smoothNormalsHash.Add(key, mesh.normals[i]);
15.     }
16.  
17.     Vector3[] smoothNormals = new Vector3[mesh.vertexCount];
18.     for (int i = 0; i < mesh.vertexCount; i++)
19.     {
20.         smoothNormals[i] = smoothNormalsHash[mesh.vertices[i]];
21.     }
22.  
23.     mesh.normals = smoothNormals;
24. }
25.  

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Saw an earlier post regarding VR. Just as curious as to whether this will cooperate with VR.