CTS - Complete Terrain Shader - Deprecated

This week we are focussing on performance and any bug fixing. Next week we will start working on our roadmap.

Roadmap so far:

• Weather update - per texture tint and wetness
• Weather integrations - with Enviro (done), Tenkoku, UniStorm, WeatherMaker, Genesis
• Transparent terrain - allows you to see into your cave systems - you will still need to manage colliders
• Color map - add more interest through colourization
• POM - fake tesselation
• Water & Snow at same time (currently mutually exclusive)
• Water Wetness - wet patch above your water
• Gaia integration and & Gaia compatible profiles
• Snow optimizations
• Mesh support

We plan to release this update in a few weeks after the existing release has stabilised. It ought to keep people pretty happy

Some people have asked about mesh blending etc - Bart will modify dynamic nature to work with CTS and you can get it that way.

 

And for those who are interested in testing CTS for yourselves here is a sample scene for a windows machine. I generated it with 2017.1.f1 - so its coming out of a beta copy of Unity.

Its a relatively light weight Gaia scene with the basic shader on it, and also a Post FX treatment that can be toggled on and off. I have not particularly optimised the scene from Gaia its just a Gaia dump.

There have been a bunch of people comparing the speed of CTS to this and that shader. IMHO, these comparisons are largely irrelevant as each shader is different and has its own special powers.

Additionally, they will change from release to release as the authors try new things. What Bart sent me last night performs differently to what he sent me the previous day.

Ours is that it is profile based, easy to use, and pretty. It's also just a few days old, and we plan to improve it over time as we get feedback from the community.

Please feel free to PM me with any feedback or suggestions you have.

http://www.procedural-worlds.com/cts/demos/

 

Hi Adam, loving the look of my new terrains; and it feels faster in VR than it was before; a quick suggestion though: to share large assets between projects, I use junctions; as CTS is saving everything within CTS folder itself, it get's rather messy. Can we have a configuration somewhere to dictate where profile + replacement textures should go.
thanks again.

 

Oh cool - glad you are enjoying it. That's a nice idea and will add it the road map. You can also just move things, and then next time it bakes etc they will stay in place. File management in unity can be quite a headache.

 

Hi Adam.I just purchased last month Megasplat and it is not working for my game (too many issues)... are you going to make a special upgrade for Megasplat users, there are many of them...

 

I was looking for a terrain shader to help take my scene to the next level and I was conflicted between RTP and CTS. I was going to ask about transparent holes for terrains as this is something I definitely need, however mesh blending is also something I need. Personally, I do not want to have to buy another asset I most likely won't use just to get mesh blending when the other option does it for me. I just feel like this feature could be added to your shader setup no problem as Bart has mentioned the possibility to do it earlier in the thread. Maybe you guys will rethink this decision in the future, I will be keeping an eye out in the meantime.

 

It's not actually possible for us to do that. Perhaps you would be better getting some help from Jason? From what i have seen and heard he is very responsive.

 

nice roadmap. I cannot wait for all those improvements.

However, it's too bad that I cannot use it yet because I need mesh support and ultimately AT 2 support. roughly do you think that will happens in the next 4 months?

 

Mesh support is 2 min but you will not be able to edit it after that - you will use only material.

 

can you unpack this comment a little bit^

 

same here. does that mean no snow/water/seasons ?

 

I mean I could generate mesh support in less then 2 min - shader version. You will be able to create material for mesh and that all. Drag and drop into mesh. You will be not able to paint it or something or hmm you do.
1) Paint terrain apply cts
2) Generate materials
3) export your terrain as mesh and apply our material with model version
4) If you want to update terrain you will have to repeat this steps

Functionality will be holded in 100%. Is that what you need?

 

Personally I was not expecting to modify the terrain mesh. I believe it's outside the scope of CTS.

And FYI my planned workflow is as follow :

- world creator export to mesh and texture (sorry @AdamGoodrich )
- Substance designer for enhancement of texture and details.
- Apply CTS shader to the mesh.
- Gena for vegetation

And I would be able to enjoy the CTS beautiful shader and enjoy snow/water RT modification ...

 

I can easily support this

 

awesome!

 

Hi,
Sorry for the question but i'm confused with the 16 textures available in CTS. Is it 4 splat textures combined with albedo height normal and ...to give 16? Or can we add up to 8 splat texture combined with normals give 16, Or ....Sorry if it sounds stupid..... I just wanna know how many different textures i can paint with? hope you understand....
Btw, Congrats Nature_Manufacture and many thanks for this tool you brought to the community

 

16 texture sets + 4 splat mask + snow set + Global normalmap + Geo layer so:
16 x AO x AlbedoSM x Normal x Height =64 +4 +5+1+1= 75 atm

 

@NatureManufacture This is verbatim what I was curious about. Glad to hear it should be a manageable update(!)

 

Many thanks for your prompt answer!! You made my day!!
...Oh my god! Hope tonight i will finally have time to play with it on Unity 5.5.4!
i can't wait!!!!!

 

The link just seems to say coming soon with no download link.

 

Along with that basic mesh support.... Would it be possible to export a composited texture for the entire tile as a super high rez image set? That way it could be attached to the exported mesh, assigned an AT2 compatible shader... And we've an AT2 supporting workflow without implicit support in CTS being required.

 

Btw... we have been spending a lot of time exploring performance.

Yep - We did a bunch of testing because we want to compare apples with apples - and the FPS script we were using was an old one from the asset store that doesn't reflect reality. We checked the application against what NVidia was showing and it was quite different.

So then we found a another FPS script that was actually accurate, as verified against NVidia and have integrated it into our system. We will make a demo available tomorrow with much more realistic performance.

Interestingly whats reported in the Unity editor seems to be wildly inaccurate at higher frame rates.

 

As we close with amplify we have few ideas about streaming but it's to early now to talk about this.

 

Are you saying your CTS shader isn't good for large worlds? Only small worlds?

 

I've got it running on a 64^km map as of today... Seems to handle large well enough, provided you've the hardware to edit at that scale. Just without streaming support you need a lot of RAM to work with it. I'm pushing 128GB for instance to do so.

 

You must have a Nasa PC 128gb ram :O

 

Nice!

If you bake for build this will remove the profiles and substitute place holder texture... which will reduce runtime memory.

 

yesh, which is why I asked the earlier question about what it did. Because I was hoping for exactly that. ^_^

 

So that means mesh-terrain blending is only supported for dynamic nature users?

 

Right now it seems so and thats Barts focus which is ok.
But I still hope it will come with CTS after the features of the current Roadmap have beed implemented. The listed features in the roadmap are far more important for me than Mesh Terrain Blending.
But well for me it does not make sense buying CTS and paying 50€ only for mesh terrain blending feature using Dynamic Nature. So hope never dies

P.S: Gonna buy CTS this weekend. Can not wait to play with it and see what it has to offer.

 

Great asset, i'm looking forward to the weather maker integration.

 

Certainly it is okay but I hope that it will allow meshing blending with other tools that Dynamic Nature. That is a great tool, but not all of us need it for simply mesh blending. Will Vertex Pro work with CTS? I use that to blend meshes and will be sad if I have to replace everything we have done with yet again another shader.

 

Well I will soon buy any terrain asset I was decided to buy RTP, but now I found this one, I know both will have its + and -. I see you have 16 textures vs their 8, quite similiar features... Anyone who has experience with both to help me decide which shall i go in?

Thanks

 

TRANSPARENT HOLES!!!!! OMG you rock.

I've been waiting for a good solution for doing this and was wondering if the CTS would.

Can't wait

 

Well, I am impressed! I've been playing with it for a whole day. It looks extremely good, especially with atmospheric scattering. I am really concerned about performance, though. I know that you are optimizing it, but still... 1800 fps on Unity terrain and 25 fps on advanced CTS... That's pretty enormous. I've been getting 180 fps by using Colormap V3 from forst with the same terrain. Are there any tips at setting it up to be faster for the time being?

 

Right now it does not make sense to compare RTP with CTS. RTP does only come with 8 textures max at the moment and this will change with RTP v4 which will probably cost a little update price. CTS already supports 16 textures.
As it stants RTP is faster in performance, where CTS is improving with upcoming updates.
So it really depends what you need in what time. Do you have time to decide? Than wait for RTP v4 and new versions of CTS and compare both then. If you don't have time you need to answer the questions:
How many textures do I need right now and how important is performance for me?
What features are mandatory for me and do I need ASAP?
Nobody knows when RTPv4 will be released so I can't tell you how long you will have to wait for more texture option... Btw if you are new to shaders and you like it simple you really should consider CTS.

As you can see some posts above the new version will fix and increase performance. Are you using SSR? Take a look to the Post Effects of Unity and disable it if your are using it.
I don't own CTS yet but as you can see a new version is coming up and Adam has post the problem of using SSR.

Cheers
Ronny

 

Also in Unity, the v-sinc option unchecked gives a HUGE amount of extra frames

 

Even with just the basic shader it looks awesome and the extra fps it gives made me choose cts to use for my project . With Adams and Barts XP things can only get better!

 

I've just optimised basic shader by 35%. Haven't finished yet but tommorow it will be it's last optimisation. Then Advanced and tess. I really must back to other packs after this. 1 week with them and I will start adding new features to cts.

 

This was extremely dumb mistake of ours. The numbers are not realistic at all. Grab latest download and you will see substantial improvement. Or for an immediate one just turn off SSR. Reflection probe setup was also not great.

Additionally, we have been optimising shader like crazy and getting good improvements. We will push this out in a few days after it's been stabilised and tested.

 

There has been some discussion on mesh blending.

We have talked about it, and decided to add it to the road map - however it is not a trivial thing to add - and will take some time to do.

We will most likely also raise the eventual target price of CTS to reflect the complexity and time that will be involved.

 

Thanks so much. Take all the time you need and concentrate on your planned roadmap. So happy to see that important features are added to CTS and you take feedback and suggestions seriously. Well I didn't expect nothing less from Adam and Bart.

Thanks guys

 

Question about Building:

Hi Adam, I have two backgrounds that uses terrain and CTS; all my backgrounds are prefab and loaded on demand - ie. my main scene has no terrain object.

With this setup, I get the following error on build:

Shader error in 'CTS Terrain Shader Advanced LOD': unrecognized identifier 'UNITY_DECLARE_TEX2DARRAY' at line 317 (on d3d9)

If I use "Package CTS for build", a new gameObject (CTS.CTSTerrainManager) gets created to the scene; but I get the same error at the end.

Any suggestions?

thanks
Rana

 

Yeah this is a weird thing and am not sure whats causing it. There isn't really any guidance around the place for how to do this.

A couple of options - removing dx9 from your build targets remove it - or alternatively - just bake - pack - save scene - build and it goes away.

This is why I am confused - the error makes no sense to me - suspect it is a Unity bug.

FYI, as far as I can tell, despite the compiler error, it still works just fine at runtime.

 

IIRC - Texture Arrays are Shader Model 4, only supported on DX10+

 

I think we probably need to add some sort of warning for DX9 based systems.

 

Looking at the docs, it appears Unity only supports them in DX11 (among others):

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-TextureArrays.html

However, like most Unity documentation, it's a bit confusing, as it also says you can use Shader Model 3.5 a little later:

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-ShaderCompileTargets.html

edit: maybe not so confusing, as I forget there is no DX10 specific Unity Rendering engine.

 

There is so much that is unsaid or assumed in the Unity doco. Its a pity they don't open source the code base - then we could dig in and work out exactly how to do it right - or alternatively - give their engineers meaningful bug reports.

 

I was using another terrain system religiously before, and I just recently picked up Gaia. To say I'm impressed with it would be to understate by a landslide. Because of your excellent product and my experience with it, I just bought CTS without even thinking twice. I'm more than happy to support developers that truly deserve it, and I look forward to my time with both Gaia and CTS. Thank you!

 

Thank you! This is my first collaboration with another publisher and I am very proud of what we have come up with - it is better than either of us would have done individually i think.

We look forward to hopefully delivering and expanding on a similarly excellent experience with CTS