CTS - Complete Terrain Shader - Deprecated

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CTS is different asset then Nature Starter. I will think about move model blending and many cool features from dynamic nature into CTS. I will probably add model blending its pretty easy It will not work like in RTP, we have other and cheaper way to do this

Basicaly Dynamic Nature Starter is pack of shaders that bring advanced winter shaders into unity - mostly models. Terrain shader was there only because it need to be. I announced in Dynamic Nature Starter that im going to make terrain shader as separated pack with many cool features so here it is CTS, Anyway I will move some shaders from Dynamic Nature Starter directly into CTS for better compatibility because we want to create clear complex and simple in use system with Adam

 

We been on Unity as well, since we are releasing a game on Steam which will be fine,but the XB1 version is behide , Unity needs to get there act in gear with consoles.. and get to 5.5 atleast... So I suggest to keep on Unity know, about that issue...that you need to use 5.5 as well... Our company has, been asking them to keep up on consoles atleast to 5.5 so we can use texture arrays tools Mobile was just as bad, with certain tools and bugs I see... Unity don't seem to not care to much about other platforms, other than PC these days.... Which is what caused me to stop mobile development... So hopefully soon, they get there act in gear for consoles, so we can use assets like this in our console releases... anyways

CTS, looks great and easy to set up.. Everyone will love it.. Set up took minutes to do... vs other tools like it, taking much longer..

 

Unity forums need to add a Love option to use instead of just like! Congrats @AdamGoodrich and @NatureManufacture on the progress with this! Now watching the thread waiting for release. Will definitely add to toolbox for when I'm able to dig back into stuff. I've been anxiously awaiting to see what the two of you come up with since you started talking about it a couple/few months back. (Time is a blur these days so can't remember exactly when you guys started talking about it with Gaia beta group but I know its been at least a couple of months... heheh)

Good luck (not that you'll need it ) on a very successful launch!!!

 

My first Gaia usage + CTS + Playway water + Enviro weather system. Work time from 0 to hero - 5h. Demo will be included in CTS pack. Everyone will be able to play with it. Ofc without weather and water.

 

[QUOTE="AdamGoodrich, post: 3115824, ...if it truly have every feature of every shader that was ever released, then it would never get an update, and then people would complain [/QUOTE]

Cheers for not trying to do and be everything in one asset. Hopefully keeping things focused will not only make it easier for you guys to do updates, but will afford you more time and energy to your other great assets and tools as well.

 

So I have to ask the question that will eventually come up anyway. What's the selling point for CTS over the established competitor, MegaSplat? I already use MegaSplat so is there some compelling reason to consider this? And for those who have neither, what sets this up above the other?

 

Do you guys have a firm release date on this yet?? I'm going to pick it up the second it comes out! I've been waiting months to get this into our VR game, and I can't believe the time is finally here! The waiting is killing me!!!

 

We need Facebook like/love/wow buttons! I love it!

 

In the next few days perhaps end of weekend at latest - final demo's, doco, polish, testing & bug fixing happening. As soon as we are happy we will push the go button.

 

Great question.

I guess the first comment I would make is that this is a community rather than a contest, and if it can sustain the development of a healthy set of tools then this is good for us all.

If you like MegaSplat - then stay with it - its a really great shader and the author @jbooth is committed to developing it further - he is in my Gaia 2 beta group and we talk quite often. It will be a first class citizen from an integration perspective with Gaia 2 as I have a lot of respect for Jason and what he has done with MegaSplat. He is a master shader coder and has been gracious enough to answer questions even though he knows Bart and I are making a competing product. That's pretty awesome imho.

Distingo is another nice terrain shader that is already integrated with Gaia, and this will remain the case. As good tools come along we will adapt CTS and I will adapt Gaia.

I buy all the top assets in the categories that are important to me - and I try them all out and keep the ones I like. What I find is that they evolve over time, and I often will go back and play when I see new updates coming out.

The shaders that have been around longer have more features - but that will change with time - we have focused on what we think are the most important features from a typical users perspective for our first release. I honestly could not imagine using naked unity terrain ever again and all G2 dev will now be done with CTS as well. A pretty cool way actually of testing CTS out in lots of scenarios.

Here are some things that CTS does very well - but everyone will have their own opinion:

• Fast - faster than Unity shader in our testing
• Easy - it really is dead simple to use - that's been the common feedback from the beta group
• Controlled - you get what you want where you want it - nothing else makes the decision for you
• Compatible with existing work flows - this is a biggie - no custom tooling or learning - it just works
• Compatible with other products - hand in hand with previous point - no unusual baking or re-tooling
• Profile based - love this - tweak stuff at run-time and keep the changes - works just like the Unity Post Processing profiles
• Integrated - the weather system will be integrated into the other leading lighting and weather systems - i was surprised at how big the difference is
• Gaia compatible - you will literally be able swap a range of different profiles in and get an instant face life and change in look for your Gaia terrains
• Will work on any terrain - so you can stick with your favorite terrain tools if they happen not to be Gaia
• Extensible - @NatureManufacture will be updating his texture packs to work well with it
• Beautiful - its just stunning

Hope that helps. By the time it releases there will also be a bunch more videos as well. People will be able to make their own call as to whether or not they think it is something they might want to use. Bart (@NatureManufacture) and I think it will do very well.

 

Thanks for the detailed response @AdamGoodrich. I agree, @jbooth is top notch and just an awesome developer. I own just about every terrain shader out there so I'm always curious when something new comes along.

 

Thx for explaining I will wait for release and then I decide what to do

BTW. Great job ! Look fantastic !

 

If someone couldn't set up CTS, then, they need to rethink even making a game... I have used many shader tools out there in my time as game developer, from Unreal , Unity, Cry and many In house... From my experience CTS so far has offered the most control, I have seen, and so easy a monkey can set it up. .. kidding aside, CTS was very simple setting up even if your NOT experienced at all with terrain shaders.. Now I have used Mega Splats and still do, they are different in many regards. So seeing this is a CTS forums I really don't want to get into a CTS VS MEGA splats contest.... other than Jason has been very helpful, and being an old school developer like myself, I respect them a lot, as being a game developer for this long, and it was a real pain in the ass many years ago, when we didn't have You tube and all these tools holding our hand...So he is a shader Wiz, in my opinion.. I personally only know a maybe 10 shader coders, and 3 of them are from Unity, Tom, Bart, and Jason. The rest are in other engines, and all are really good as shader coders, in my opinion. Which have all been top notch tools...

CTS set up.. Easier than anything on Unity..
Control, well its close to Mega Splats, CTS prolly a bit more..

With out giving away to much before release, there are a few things I feel mega splats is a bit better at.... and again this is a matter of taste and that is realism. In some regards.. But I also used Mega Splats way more.. So it really depends.. what your after. CTS still looks amazing and has plenty of realism, I feel Mega Splats, is a bit better in that regards. being honest.. and again just my opinion ..

 

OK so I am fairly new to Unity and game production in general. In fact I only started messing with Unity about 6 months ago and I am definitely a part-time programmer, probably committing 10 hours a week to Unity.

Adam recently let me get involved with his beta of CTS and Gaia 2 as he wanted a new-comers perspective.

I have followed the tutorials that Adam has made for both Gaia and CTS and have since spent around 2 hours making my first world.

These 2 images below are made using 3 assets - Gaia, CTS and Playway water.
They are using only 4 textures which were all included in the CTS pack.

In actual fact I have only used 3 textures, as I have used one twice with and increased smoothness to make it look like the rock was wet where the water touches the erosion.

The lighting is using only Gaia - not post-process effects.
The world itself literally took me a minute to make. It took me another minute to change the 4 Gaia textures to these new ones. It actually took me longer to pick the textures than to change them!

In terms of CTS

The strata effect on the rocks is very easy to set up and not only adds interest from a distance, but it also helps to remove the tiling effect. It certainly adds a little pazzaz to the island.
It is literally one main slider per texture and ~10 other sliders which I play with until I get the desired effect.

This is also true on the ground textures - a simple slider allows you to merge textures together in a natural way to ensure that there are no unwanted 'lines' where 2 textures mix. Just mess with the sliders until you see the desired look.

By clicking on the advanced tab my normal terrain textures suddenly have a height map added to the normals to really enhance the detail. Something I personally feel is missing from Unity itself.

The world I have designed is supposed to be a desolate Mars type planet (with water - I know!) but had I wanted to add snow it was a simple slider again. Another slider allows you to change the height of the mountain that the snow begins to settle. These snow textures can easily be changed for water textures and the same would apply.

The quality of the textures are simply outstanding and plentiful. I actually found myself swapping the textures a lot just playing.

I hope I have portrayed the beauty of both Gaia and CTS - the ease in which it set up.and the ease that it can be manipulated. The support material (I'm a Youtube kind of guy) are incredibly insightful and the feedback from both creators is excellent although to be fair most issues can be sorted with a bit of trial-and-error fine tinkering.

For a new person to the scene the simplicity of these packages mean I can focus my time on the coding side of game design.

 

I am sure I asked this before, but can't recall the answer. Will it work with other water, like Aquas, or only for Playway?

 

It is just a shader - so assuming the water is well behaved it should work. I have heard that Aquas doesn't write depth buffers - but don't know enough about it to comment.

My more recent testing has been with Playway, but will run AQUAS up and see how it looks.

 

Works beautifully with latest version of AQUAS from @dogmachris. Nice work on the latest update Chris

 

Any idea if it works well with Suimono?

 

Yep - Suimono as absolutely stunning as ever!

 

Sorry....but K.I.S.S. Just lerp the CTS Wetness Slider after a Rain Event or Snow is Melting Event. The events can be made up in your own script to tie into CTS flawlessly and fluidly. Nothing personal but no need to go crazy with specially crafted textures to do something that is already there.

One other thing about Water and Wetness. I am currently testing out rising and lowering water levels based upon these Wetness Events. Working really well and uses just about any water as long as it is a mesh. Snow piles and puddles also working.

I will most likely release this stuff as an addon to CTS that is stand alone but designed to be integrated in Genesis Weather...not too much work to convert it to some other weather/environmental system. Currently the waters tested-ing are Realistic Water, Aquas, Hydroform, and DCG Water Shader. Puddles and Snow Piles are a small/medium custom mesh and texture with Standard Spec setup that raise slowly from under the terrain.

 

Yes this will work well in general. But wetness characteristics are variable depending on the surface it's interacting with, and will react differently with stone as compared to a more absorbant material like dirt or clay. A single channel mask is a great way to control this interaction. Just thoughts for the future.

 

@Olander

What I believe your referring to is a porosity map, like they used in Uncharted's water system. It's nice if you have the extra channel, but you can actually compute porosity from the roughness and metallic values that gives a reasonable approximation of what you'd paint into your surface anyway (this is what I do in MegaSplat). This is because the porosity map represents the micro-facet structure of a surface the same way that a roughness map does- rougher surfaces will generally collect more water while smoother surfaces will not, and metallic surfaces will not absorb water, while non-metallics will. So gives a roughness/metallic value, you can usually get something very close to what you'd paint into a porosity map anyway, without the extra work.

 

Is it compatible with splatmap terrains (e.g. mesh terrains exported from gaia)?

 

No. Not in first release. Shaderwise it easily achieved but UX wise its deeply integrated with Unity terrain. If you are comfortable without the nice UX setup though then this should be possible relatively soon after release.

 

And... two big milestones today.. the weather system is now way more sophisticated... and I added Pegasus integration... demo videos on this will come soon as well.

The cool thing about the Pegasus integration is that a Pegasus can now control snow, rain and seasons... this makes for some wild automation possibilities!

 

Can't wait for this, it looks great.

I'm currently using Time of Day, Playway & RTP. What are the performance difference to RTP?

 

Hehe. No idea.

 

What I assume is following:
- You don't need a LOD Manager which needs lot of time to generate the Shaders and features at the beginning. CTS will be fast and work immediately. You can work on the terrain on the fly without compiling and using the LOD Manager everytime.
- CTS will not offer so many options and features which usually eats lot of performance. So performancewise CTS should be faster.
- CTS will support 16 textures on firstpass and not only 4-8.

But well we really will see how the performance is, if CTS gets released. For me it will be pretty interesting to see if it's faster than RTP without RTP's Heightmap for the whole Terrain feature. As you know RTP offers to create a heightmap for the whole terrain (Tesselation for Terrain) to increase the Pixel Error value to something like 200 to get more perfomance without loosing height details. It will be interesting to see how CTS will perform by using normal pixel error values like 5-10 because it does not come with this option. If it's still faster, RTP will be completely destroyed performancewise

Damn I can't wait...
Cheers
Ronny

 

CTS has lots of yummy things... here is a preview of the CTS weather manager and integration with Pegasus!

Please excuse UX and flythrough - the UX not complete and the fly through was made in about 5 mins to test the technology - just a quick hack that will be polished before release - but super excited to be able to show such cool concepts!

Naturally we are using Pegasus to do all our demo videos.

 

When you fly over the grass at the beginning You see clearly that Tesselation Feature on Terrain (Heightmaps) is renedered when you come closer to the terrain texture itself. So something is configured like min. distance for tesellation= 0m max distance for tesselation= 10m, I think. Are this values configurable?
I would love to increase the distance where the terrain textures are using tesselation to something like 30-50m starting from the camera, perhaps also with a fade out option using meter values to make the transition smoother. So you don't see the change from texture withouth heightmap to texture with heightmap so strong like in the video.

 

Tessellation is an option and highly configurable.. but this video is of the advanced (non tessellation) shader with height blending. Its not a tidy terrain because its my dev version of the past month. I break things lots and don't necessarily fix, so its probably not useful to over analyse it. Bart is putting together the more polished environments

The interesting concept being demoed here is weather control and it's ability to be integrated with other systems. To test I integrated it with Pegasus. It is now easy for 3rd party weather systems to be able to integrate in a simple robust way via script and this will work as nicely on 1 terrain as it will on 100. The Pegasus integration forces us to eat our own dog food and validate that it works and is useful. We learned by doing this and between this and feedback from the beta group what will be released will be better than what was originally envisioned.

The UX is for testing and configuration as much as anything else, and will be finished tomorrow. When complete it will be able to control weather and seasonal effects per texture to get very tight terrain shading.

This system will make it super easy for other assets to be able to integrate with CTS and be able to offer a more synergistic link between weather and its effect on terrain.



Here is a sense of some the UX - as usual its all about usability



And while its more about script based integration... UX is still important.

 

@chingwa @jbooth

No need for a porosity map. @jbooth nailed the answer. Here is a couple of testing pics of Light Rain and Heavy Rain in CTS. The result is very satisfactory with no additional texture work and special channels. The only thing missing here are the puddles but those are being handled by spot placing meshes and giving them some smarts to raise and lower. Snowing is handled the same way in which a slider is controlling the accumulation and melt off which combining the 'Wetness' slider and 'Snow' slider you can get icy and snow conditions. During testing these features were added gradually and hammer tested then modified again.

Works amazingly well.
*No Post FX in the pics at all....just Genesis Weather (which controls lighting as well)

 

@Olander @jbooth Good point. I think that solution could give similar results in most cases. I was trying to think of situations where this wouldn't work, such as a hard crystalline rock vs sandstone, but even in that case the roughness map would go a long way to simulate the same effect.

 

I think it mostly affects fog. Not sure if your shader will add fog but would love to see a picture of Aquas with a foggy atmosphere. That is where I have issues with almost every other shader out there.

 

Seeing that a fair amount of people use Sky Master as well, I will try CTS later this week with Sky Master, water and more, to see how well it behaves with it.. I suspect it shouldn't be an issue.

Far as RTP, I still use for caves, and other aspects.. I did a quick test to compare, all 3 terrain shader tools, far as performance, I don't see much of a difference....

my opinion, it will come down to set up, which CTS wins.. Control, CTS wins..Depending on what you need in your game for example RTP has a bit more. But like any tool, it will come down to what is needed in your game, and what is CTS lacking, compared to RTP, at release... I'm sure as CTS matures that will change, that is the only difference I see in RTP... but this could all change with RTP4.. never know... I still love that CTS is easy to set up, I always found RTP to be a bit much ...


Lastly, being someone who does mobile development..... with a game in development, Mega splats, wins for supporting more platforms.. So as I said comes down to what you need...... But I suggest if you are not great with setting up, or even if you are good but don't want to spend hours setting up, then I would use CTS.. Our terrains have been looking really nice.. I hate spending hours setting up terrain shaders..

 

Teila

for the Fog problem did you go to Edit > Project Settings > Graphics Settings > Fog Modes and set it from Automatic to Manual this solve most of my problem when dealing with Fog

Don't know if this could help you

 

Here is an example of the new weather integration - now nailed.

 

And here is Enviro weather systems driving CTS weather. Very cool!

 

Really nice. The snow on terrain is a littble bit strange in my opinion. But perhaps I am just seeing it wrong.
Normaly when its snowing higher terrain parts get the snow faster than lower parts. So mountains or textures with stonger displacement maps should get the snow first before painting it on lower parts. Right now it seems that you start with the lower parts in the video and after that the higher parts get the snow. Or that you don't distinguish between the mountain and the lower terrain.

And what exactly is happening in 1:47 at the start of the mountain. Its looking ugly but I think the Snow Effect is changing Tesselation options for some textures? It seems that the Heightmaps / Mountain displacement changed.

Hmm perhaps I am invastigating too much. Sorry

 

@GuinUK
Does this happen automatically in CTS?

 

First I'd like to say thanks for making excellent products this is going in my collection, second I've noticed a few members posting here have water assets I'm interested in mainly Suimono and Playway. I have no problem buying Suimono as it does a great job of explaining what you get but can anyone justify buying Playway? for $100 is it more realistic and efficient? The money isn't my concern it's support and quality and as a newbie any advice I receive is a life saver. Thank you for reading my post.

 

Yes, very cool! Curious, does the snow cover the entire terrain or can you use Environ's zones so the snow only covers the areas you want covered with snow. For example, only the mountain tops.

 

It is so beautiful but the developer is passing it off to someone else so I hesitate buying it while it is in limbo. It is on my watch list so we will see what happens. From what I have heard, it is more efficient than Suimono but haven't tried it yet.

 

Final CTS second movie. BTW demo scene from movie will be included.

 

So tried out tonight one of the last CTS Beta Build coupled with Gaia, RUSTIC Grounds, AQUAS, ToD + Enviro, HBAO, Post Processing Stack and one Filter from Colorful FX (Vintage).

Still need to populate my Scene but I must say CTS is Freaking Awesome, faster, easy and full options^^.

 

Stunning shot - thanks

 

Basically as you click 'automatic' or 'tessalation' you find that whatever had been the textures used get copied onto the profile as shown below.
Adam has copied the texture files next to it and an addition empty slot appears next to it. It is very simple to use.
Being a novice I just play with the sliders until it looks good

I'm sure Adam won't mind me posting this even though it is in beta.

Hi Telia,

The snow is so easy to use. You pick the height you want it to work at in a similar way to you pick the height you want your water to work at in Gaia and it naturally blends the snow in. You have a lot of options with the snow.
I know you are a Gaia user so it basically uses a similar system as you decide where to paint normal textures.
As you can see above you can even decide how much coverage each texture gets as well as the height in which it starts. I've very quickly added snow to my mars scene to show you which kind of looks weird but you get the idea.


Here I have asked CTS to snow anywhere flat at all heights. - you can still see the rocks between - this looks nice with the terraces I've created using Gaia. Here I chose the angle that I wanted it to paint in a similar way that Gena knows where not to spawn prefabs (if that makes sense) I select the angle and CTS does its thing.


Here I have picked the height at which is starts to stop being snowy. You can choose how quickly it fades from snow to rock as well as the exact height. Looks a bit weird on sandy, martian terrain but you get the idea.

Or you can bugger about with sliders like I do until you get what you want it to look like.
Finally you can decide how much of the previous terrain shape pushes through.

It is very pleasing to the eye, and very simple to do. I added the snow just to show you and it literally took me 30 seconds.

 

Hey Adam. I will be picking this up soon as it drops! Thanks for this awesome work you all did.

 

I've optimised cts shaders by 40% just before release

 

It's not like they were bad before. Pretty much matched Unity's already!