[Cancelled] Optimized Mobile Terrain + Bump Mapping on Mobile Terrain

Hello,

I wanted to show you the technology we created for our game "Edge Of Eternity" it's still a huge WIP but we plan to sell it in a few weeks on the asset store but before we'd like to known if you people are interested in this system.

The mobile terrain system work by converting the existing Unity Terrain into procedural geometry, we transfer every datas from the original terrain, texturing, planting, geometry, etc ... so you don't have to work on multiple terrains or use badly optimized tools, the recalculation take about one second when clicking the rebuild MTS button.

The system allow you to have a terrain on mobile that have a lot less drawcalls, lot less triangles and batch everything !

The mobile terrain system create procedural geometry tiles and use the unity LOD system to swap them depending on the distance. MTS allow you more control of the terrain quality like distance based LOD quality, shadow tile distance, directional lightmapping for bump/spec and much more.

The mobile terrain system have been tested within our game that run really smooth on 2011+ devices (Galaxy S2/iPhone 4S) at least for bumpspec, diffuse setting can allow you to reach less powerful devices but we didn't tested it on real game situation to check the performance.

The mobile terrain system fix some major issues that Unity Terrain have on mobile like the "pixelating" bug of textures on low precision mobile gpu like tegra 3 or mali 400.

By using LOD system it allow much more near details than using a geometry for mobile terrain !

What the mobile terrain system can do for you ?

(Open images in new tab to view the triangles / drawcalls)

Every screenshots have far clip distance 1000

High control level of detail (control near and far LOD quality)

Low mobile quality


High mobile quality


Comparison with Unity Terrain at the same settings (pixel error 1 for Unity Terrain and LOD Quality max and Geometry Level max for MTS)

Unity Terrain


MTS Terrain High


We still have to work the normal calculation to have the same shadowing than the default unity terrain it's still an early prototype !

We managed to optimize shaders per platform and make bumpmapping / bumped specular on mobile to run smoothly with directional lightmaps !



We'd like to hear any feedbacks !

 

Updated

 

Need more information in general about how it works, if it supports streaming and so on.

 

The system doesn't use the Unity Terrain System, it create tiles with different geometry LOD level, streaming is supported but not finished atm (missing stitching for tilable uv).

It's designed essentially for mobile platforms even if it's supported on other platforms, it fix some major issues that Unity Terrain have on mobile like the "pixellating" bug of textures on low precision mobile gpu like tegra 3 or mali 400, it use a lot less drawcall and triangles than Unity Terrain and it batch geometry for performance.

It support bumpmapping and bumpspec on mobile, Unity Terrain can't do that since it's designed to run 8 textures per pass with bumpmap.

Grass and trees are batched and can use tree creator wind or ATS mobile vegetation for wind, it allow to use prefab for planting instead of only renderers.

The usage is very easy just drag and drop the terrain data into the script and click the button rebuild and in less than one second the Unity Terrain is copied into the MTS.

Globally the MTS allow to have the level of detail on terrain we can have on PC games on mobile with all optimizations that can't be done with Unity Terrain.

 

In which way is it different/better than T4M?

 

T4M convert the Unity Terrain to geometry, it doesn't use tiled LOD so we can have more near geometry detail with our Terrain System because it use a lot less triangles since far geometry is culled / lod.

T4M allow maximum 4 textures, we can use all terrain textures coming from Unity Terrain on our MTS with multipass shaders. It allow bumpmapping to mobile too.

T4M doesn't convert grass and trees and don't batch them.

And to finish T4M doesn't fix the "pixelated" tiled textures on low precision mobile GPU that we fixed.

 

Thanks for the clarification!
I'm using T4M in my current project, but I would love to try yours when it hits the Asset Store.

 

Thanks, i'm preparing a free demo that i will put on google play store if you want to give it a try .

 

The 4 textures thing is very fast though. It could end up faster than your LOD system just throwing a bunch of meshes at the GPU tile deferred hardware which culls unseen triangles. You should have some fast options in your bag as well - your customers will thank you for it.

 

Very very interested! I've been using T4M for a long time but would love a better solution--especially one that converts a completed terrain with trees to mobile-optimized format.

 

I'm really interested in this tool. Especially in the terrain pixelation fix for the low precision GPU's, but I have a few questions:
1. When will it be released and how much will it cost?
2. Will your tool be compatible with EasyRoads 3D?

 

If this works as advertised then I have money waiting for it.

 

Sounds great! Definitely on my shopping list!

 

very impressed. On my shopping list as well for my next project.

 

Watching this...

 

Sorry i was working hard on our project i will continue the developement of the system this month, i hope to release a first public beta next month.

I am looking for some alpha testers (it's not production ready atm so don't expect to use this version for your final game ), the final package will be free for them !

 

Sign me up as an alpha tester, please!

 

Me too! Would love to help you get this fully functional

 

What is the current status of this project? It seems really awesome and usefull.

Can it eventually support holes in the terrain? I don't mean the ability to escavate the terrain but just remove tiles so that regular meshes can be used for caves etc.

 

We need to improve some features before releasing the alpha to testers, we need to work more on trees.

 

If you need an extra tester I'll gladdly volunteer. I'm working on a mobile game that uses the inbuilt terrain and feel it is slowing down my game a bit.

I'll gladly buy this depending on the price of course. What is the range of price you're thinking of?

 

We also need mobile terrain for our game. And will pay good price if it will fit our needs.
But i want to try it now (i need to complete mobile prototype in next two weeks), can you give me current version? Please

 

Hello, im really interested in this too.

 

Looks very interesting.
Have implemented a custom terrain system for mobiles myself (for having entire real world countries like the US for playground in a railroad empire game) - but I think you do have an interesting solution that I might consider swapping my own system for in another project.
You say you bake different LOD version - how do you handle stitching gaps between tiles with multiple LOD levels visible in a scene? If you rely on Unity for swapping LOD levels (which is a PRO feature), I guess you cannot. On the other hand, selecting LOD's manually and stitching them seems like a lot of work on a mobile when you zoom really far out...
Also, is height calculations consistent regardless of current LOD - for placing buildings, roads, extending pillars from bridges etc?
Love to see more details !

 

LOD's are pre-stitched, the borders of each tiles is at max details level to make every tile match each LOD level and Height Levels are fixed since it's precomputed, it's one of the counterpart to have such high level of performance.

 

how do you fix the pixelated tiled textures on low precision mobile gpus?

 

As far as I can find, there's no solution yet. Which is crazy to think that Unity/T4M terrain is still pretty much unusable on many Android devices.

 

yeah, it's REALLY bad on Tegra 4. The problem gets worse the more times you tile your texture across it. The only solution I have found is to split things up into smaller meshes, like 25x25 mesh, with texture tiling across it <= 25 times. Which is really inconvenient and not really a solution.

Ultimately though, I think this is an issue that could be solved with specific shaders. But i'm not a shader expert. On the Unreal Engine documentation, they have some information (and unreal apparently has "customized UV inputs" that you can use to get around this issue):

there is more information regarding customized uv's in Unreal here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/CustomizedUVs/index.html


I think in unity, you may be able to get aroudn this problem by creating a shader like this:


I'm not sure how to implement this (or if it's possible) using Shader Forge, as I don't think it has any customized UV slots like that.

 

Are you selling it or not? It doesn't make any sense if you are just boasting, show me the demo, not just some plain snapped textures.
I need a better terrain system badly. Put it on the asset store or let people test it.

 

What is the current status of this product ?

I am looking for an alternative to T4M for mobile use, and came across this thread.

It is relevant to my interests.

 

is this still viable ?

 

I'm still planning to release it but didn't have the time to work on it ATM, i'm non-stop working on our two current games.

 

I was just trying to use Unity terrain for some of my coming demos for Particle Dynamic Magic and it is really slow.

Of course my phone is not state of the art or even close, so i am not sure how it would be on a better one

Nice to know a more optimized terrain is coming, will be great help for any mobile game

 

Any update? T4M looks like it hasn't been updated in over a year and comments not positive, so very interested in this as a possible solution for mobile terrain optimization.

 

If you don't plan to release this is there anyway I can buy this from you directly?