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CTS - Complete Terrain Shader - Deprecated

Discussion in 'Assets and Asset Store' started by AdamGoodrich, Jun 19, 2017.

  1. RonnyDance

    RonnyDance

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    Yeah thats right. Enviro for example already supports changing model on different weather types. The only problem you have is that you need to spawn all Trees as Meshes / Prefabs on the terrain and not as Terrain Trees.
     
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  2. eaque

    eaque

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    I didn't know genesis until Adam quoted it in the weather tools integration; I really wanna have a look at it! It's great to see such a tool for free. But i can't find any video on youtube? @Oldander you should make some!

    @Adam, when will we get this integration with genesis? lol and what do you think of genesis?
     
  3. Teila

    Teila

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    Vegetation Studios will do this. You can change trees based on seasons. Since Winter is a season, it would work. Now we just have to wait until it is released. :)
     
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  4. llJIMBOBll

    llJIMBOBll

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    I'm pretty sure uNature can do this but have to ask @ElroyUnity .
     
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  5. Cleverlie

    Cleverlie

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    hi, sorry for that! I've checked the first post and stupidly missed that last part! thanks for the answer
     
  6. Olander

    Olander

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    I will be providing an integration script once I have tested out the new version of CTS coming. It will be on my web page and as a separate download from the Genesis Weather.

    In this public version it is a completely separate script (component) that finds the Genesis Weather Master and the CTS Weather Manager and fully controls the CTS WM with Temperature and Rain/Snowing over time. The snow will stay for a long time if the temperature is -5C or less. If the sky is relatively sunny and temperature is above -5C it slowly melts and saturates the wetness of CTS. The rain is a bit more direct and dries CTS a bit quicker. This is currently directly tied into the shader...so redirecting it to the CTS WM that Adam has kindly made/provided.

    Of note I have additional cloud textures that I am also adding for more variety...also for free.

    As for videos...Genesis Weather has and always will be just a character in an area/scene. So all pics that I make has it in there. The effect on GI lighting is incredible. There are videos coming that have both CTS and Genesis Weather in there but also lots of other things....not specifically weather.

    Cheers
    O
     
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  7. magique

    magique

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    I asked before but got no answer. Why does the demo scene say 1680x1050 resolution in 1280x720 window? I selected 1280x720 as the resolution when I ran the demo.
     
  8. syscrusher

    syscrusher

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    As Robert Heinlein famously said, "TANSTAAFL". (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch)
     
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  9. Tethys

    Tethys

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    This is awesome @AdamGoodrich , thanks again for making another great tool. RTP was good back in the day but never gets any more modern work done on it so we moved over to MegaSplat. MS has been great but lacks some features we have been looking for. CTS looks like it could be a win for us but we have one big question - both of our projects have procedural voxel terrain that is generated at run time, so we use TriPlanar shaders with auto coverage on them. Does this TriPlanar terrain shader do its coverage automatically via normal direction or something else, or do you need to hand paint the textures on the terrain first?
     
  10. Olander

    Olander

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    I have been in both engines heavily. Many of you probably know from forum postings that I moved on to UE4 fully for decent period. I will say that Unity 5.4+ changed my opinion. I have been back in Unity 5 now for awhile and am going to stay.

    - CTS basically trashed my custom ATSv2 version <= this was a pain to paint in to get looking right. I am happy for CTS.
    - Genesis Weather and GI is so much easier to control in Unity 5.4+ and if done properly...you cannot tell the difference.
    - Gaia and World Creator both make landscapes easy in Unity....in fact....I was using them to make landscapes in UE4.
    - Unity's terrain is old and basic...perhaps with our newfound tools it is now fine and needs little updating?

    Amazing to see where Unity has finally come to.
     
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  11. magique

    magique

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    Here's another benchmark for you on my new dev machine. Tessellated with post fx.

    upload_2017-7-4_8-55-26.png

    It's not abysmal like the other card and machine I tried it on, but considering it's a small terrain with no vegetation and nothing else going on aside from post fx, it's still not good. And from the looks of it, post fx looks simply like tone mapping. I can get close to the same fps right now with a much larger scene (4kx4k), full/lush Vegetation System with SpeedTrees and grass (touch bending), PRISM with bloom, filmic tone mapping, LUT color correction, Time of Day with sun rays, MegaSplat with tessellation, Next gen Soft Shadows, and character running around.

    upload_2017-7-4_9-5-10.png

    And with a few tweaks to vegetation density and some other params, I could probably match or exceed the swamp demo with nothing.

    Performance definitely needs to improve with CTS if you're going to convince people it's a viable option. You should focus all your efforts and optimization.
     
    Last edited: Jul 4, 2017
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  12. buttmatrix

    buttmatrix

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    using Unity terrain shading, or...?
     
  13. raja-naveen

    raja-naveen

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    Hi @AdamGoodrich ! CTS is amazing already getting great results. Had few questions for you. Kudos on making it user friendly.

    1. Trying to add more than 4 textures to the terrain, even though i succeeded, i cant figure out where to add height/slope based rules for the textures in CTS. CTS is using only first 4 textures to paint whole terrain. Do i need to add all the textures (13 atm) & assign height/slope rules in gaia before adding CTS to terrain? or is there a hidden menu in CTS where i can access the rules for terrain textures?

    2. As of now tessellation mode is acting up and having strange artifacts like dark shadows, Tessellating infront of the camera which makes terrain literally popup & rises. Cant see proper parallaxing.

    3. We are using textures created in megascans studio for our terrain & generating Albedo, AO, Displacement, Normal, Specular & Roughness. But at the moment CTS offers only Albedo, Normal & Height. Can we hope for more texture types integration in future? Dont take me wrong, we like what we have, But having extra control over our textures helps us to tweak & make terrain look even better.
     
  14. Teila

    Teila

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    Forgot about uNature! :) Great asset.
     
  15. Teila

    Teila

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    I do not yet own CTS, but I believe you need to use Gaia or some other asset for height/slope based texturing. CTS is a shader you apply after doing this.
     
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  16. magique

    magique

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    As I said, using MegaSplat with tessellation. Look at the long list of assets and effects I am using (I listed in the post). Plus, I was running my scene in the editor and the CTS demo was in stand-alone. I think my fps will match that CTS demo once I run stand-alone. Or closer anyway.
     
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  17. shwa

    shwa

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    I meant as finished standalones.
    Since CTS is currently crashing my system, i am curious to see the quality of the experience.
     
  18. shwa

    shwa

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    Hi Nature M,
    Sorry, i wasn't clear. CTS is crashing when i try and import it. It happens at the end of the import. I have the apple crash reports if that's helpful.
     
  19. raja-naveen

    raja-naveen

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    Thought so, Thanks for the answer. :)
     
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  20. magique

    magique

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    As suspected, running my scene in stand-alone boosts performance. It now outperforms the bare CTS demo by a nice margin. I love Adam and I think he has some great products. I own Gaia and Gena and while I don't use Gaia much anymore, for personal preferences, it's a great product. I absolutely would support it and the other products Adam has. But CTS is not production ready by a long shot. I could not support this in its current form. I anticipate Adam and NatureManufacturer will ultimately whip this into shape and I hope they do. It will be good for all involved.

    upload_2017-7-4_9-59-5.png
     
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  21. ZoneOfTanks

    ZoneOfTanks

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    Jep, that's true.
    As long as there are such amazing assets available for Unity it rocks :)
     
  22. Olander

    Olander

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    @magique
    Not throwing a wrench into you machine but....hehe...there is something about CTS that perhaps you (and others) may be slightly missing.

    In CTS there need not be Any special processing/conversion of textures for CTS to work really well. Also at 1080p there is no distinguishable difference between 1k and 2k textures. This means that with really good 1k PNG (DXT1) basic no RGB channel prep nonsense you get excellent results. This alone is what had me 'Lightbulbed' into CTS. This is an enormous time saver as well as alleviates any confusion about making proper channel splats for blending.

    I will say this...it is absolutely critical in Any terrain system you will use that the Normal Maps are prepared properly. They cannot be over/under prepared. They must be subtle and react in lighting very well. Take the time to make them. I use GIMP with the Normal Map filter. Here are the settings to make them. Most normal maps are not created properly.
    Note: Scale should start at 5.00 (10.00 is absolute maximum as shown) GIMP Normal Map Maximum Settings.png
     
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  23. magique

    magique

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    Well, I didn't have to do any texture conversion at all. I just used the provided textures, which work quite nice. I'm sure if I needed custom textures that they wouldn't be too hard to convert though. It's not like I would be converting textures over and over and over again. And, honestly, it doesn't matter if that process is easier or more convenient with CTS. If the result is unusable due to performance being so bad then what have you gained?

    [EDIT]
    I'll add this. I've bought literally hundreds of assets from the store and quite a few look really, really beautiful. Unfortunately, many of those beautiful assets turned out to suck performance so much that they were unusable.
     
  24. Olander

    Olander

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    Agreed. So many really solid potential assets and ended up being basically learning experiences. :(

    If you are just going to stay within the pre-prepared boxes of something like Mega-Splat and others. Then super. It is when you have a catalog of 5.1GB of landscape textures in 2k PNG (1.68GB in 1k) that now have to be converted to TGA/TIF/PSD and channel split because of special shader processes....it is then one begins to bash the head against the table and ask why o why. hehe.

    In your pic you are showing 112fps. In your game design you will need ~45-50fps for no motion lag. Plenty of budget left. Trees, Rocks, Veggies and such should be no more than ~25fps....if it is then there is something wrong. Which still leaves ~87fps. Not a bad budget to play with at all. Should be able to hit 50-60fps very reliably with plenty of 'scrunge' and characters about. From the look in the lighting in that screen pic you could add fps with configuring the lighting properly. Just rolling out some numbers. :):p

    To be honest I am not a defender of CTS or any other. Simply a realist. Amazing we are now discussing some truly awesome terrain tools. I am not an owner of Mega-Splat since I had my own custom solution but I do own RTP, ATS, Distingo....and many others. I have watched all the Mega-Splat videos....really nice system but do not like the inability to 'Paint' on the terrain without making some sort of splat again. Different strokes for different folks.

    I am happy to work within the budget of CTS. And tesselation is completely over-rated....especially with solid normal maps.

    Cheers...and great discussions!
    O
     
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  25. ZoneOfTanks

    ZoneOfTanks

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    This exactly the reason why we moved away from MegaSplat ;)
    Imagine if you need often to change textures in Substance Designer - after a day or two of intensive work with your terrain you just can become crazy on exporting-packing-updating. It is no way a great asset should be. Better we spend our time for making great terrains than for messing with textures.
     
  26. magique

    magique

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    lol. It's just a test scene. Not a game. But what exactly is improper about the lighting? I'm no lighting expert, but I have no clue what you think is wrong.
     
  27. magique

    magique

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    You kind of missed the whole point. If I can get better than that 112 fps already (by 8 fps) with all the other stuff added, then I have a much larger fps budget to increase detail, add more AI, and the all important particle effects that are inevitably going to bring your game to its knees. Just pointing out the massive gap between theory and reality.
     
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  28. AdamGoodrich

    AdamGoodrich

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    For anyone paying attention I posted yesterday that we really botched the swamp demo. A reflection of a very poor demo, not on the shader.

    By doing some basic terrain optimisation I improved tessellated performance by about 70fps on that demo. Later in the the day I published a demo that doubles the performance of the swamp demo again in basic mode by using some basic terrain optimisation.

    So we know we can improve our performance and we are actively working to do so. Things could always be better.

    We also know Jason, a nice guy, and amazing shader guru. The approach he has taken to making Megasplat is very different to the approach we have taken to making CTS.

    He rewrote terrain splatting, we chose to stick with it. We got usability and compatibility. He got more speed and the ability to do things differently.

    Both shaders can be made to do different things in different ways and be made to get different results and it's really easy to sit there and compare something that you don't like in one shader with something you do like in another.

    The end result is that what you get is a comparison between apples and oranges and the ability to declare blueberries the winner.

    We are open and honest about our performance and provide demos that compare our performance to Unity so that nobody is under any illusions, and to give ourselves something to measure against so that we can improve.

    However, this is a forum about CTS, so we would appreciate if the discussion was kept to CTS and not made into a comparative bashing exercise.
     
    Last edited: Jul 4, 2017
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  29. magique

    magique

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    I don't think you have anything to worry about, Adam. CTS has already climbed to #6 on top paid assets in just a short period of time. It was #8 yesterday.
     
  30. NatureManufacture

    NatureManufacture

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    Not enough space at disc during import? Send us log or error. Unity import system have huge problems last time :/
     
  31. Olander

    Olander

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    No...actually I understood your point. There is more going on here than simply a head to head on FPS on terrain. There is a little more in this than that. It is indeed not an apples to apples test. Enough stated.
     
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  32. NatureManufacture

    NatureManufacture

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    This shadows are because of light bias. Small shadows at unity terrain without some work at shadow quality work pretty bad.
    We support: albedo (rgb) smoothness(a) normal, height, ao. Use specular as rgb is too expensive for terrain solution. Waste of gpu source we calculate spec our method.
     
    Last edited: Jul 4, 2017
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  33. AdamGoodrich

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    Yes. By default Gaia does what it can with 4 textures and only used 4 to minimise performance constraints of standard unity terrain shader. CTS can support 16, so if you want to add more textures you will need to adjust the Gaia texture spawner to use them. Now that CTS is out I will explore adding more sophisticated texture spawning in Gaia 2.

    As Bart commented, check your shadow bias. Also, tesselation should be used like normals. You add a little just to get interesting enhancement. It's a very expensive effect.

    We already support Albedo, AO, Displacement == Height, & Normals, and today I will add a new slot so that we can also bake in Roughness.
     
  34. AdamGoodrich

    AdamGoodrich

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    I was playing and thought I would compare our demo against the unity shader.

    Side by side the difference is quite amazing. To be fair all I did was just switch between shaders, and in reality I should have adjusted light etc... but even had I done that, it still would have been amazingly different.

    This demo will be included in the next release.

    CTS Basic VS Unity.jpg
     
    Last edited: Jul 4, 2017
  35. chanfort

    chanfort

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    Hi Adam, looks very impressive! I was trying to understand what Runtime Mode actually means here. In my case runtime is that terrain is being generated procedurally as player moves to one direction or another (i.e. MapMagic or simple infinite terrain tutorial http://code-phi.com/infinite-terrain-generation-in-unity-3d/). Just wondering - is CTS compatible with new terrains generated on runtime?
     
  36. AdamGoodrich

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    Yep it should be. Its just a shader, and the only thing that changes are the global terrain normals, so I wpuld set that to zero or alternatively generate it at runtime as well. This is a very subtle effect, so you in general wont miss it.
     
  37. RobsonFMaciel

    RobsonFMaciel

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    If my textures do not have "normal map" is it possible to create within CTS?
     
  38. AdamGoodrich

    AdamGoodrich

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    No.
     
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  39. RobsonFMaciel

    RobsonFMaciel

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    No problem :) Tks Adam
     
  40. rasto61

    rasto61

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  41. AdamGoodrich

    AdamGoodrich

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    And here is a little sneak preview of whats coming in the next release.

    Its a couple of things - first - a tidy up of the arrays that drive the shader - they are now tucked away out of sight.

    And the actual fun bit - and anyone who has ever set up terrain textures knows how tedious it can be. We are creating a library of pre-done profiles. All you need to do is add CTS to your terrain, apply the profile, and instantly it will update. The next release will be a sampler, and we will increase this over time.

    By the way - these can be switched at runtime - as we have done in our demo's - so this creates a huge amount of flexibility.

     
    Last edited: Jul 5, 2017
  42. Rowlan

    Rowlan

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    I'd appreciate it if you'd classify the advertising screenshots in regards to what is in the asset if you buy it and what's not. I moved away from TC2 to Gaia because the TC2 dev advertises with screenshots which you can only achieve in combination with several other expensive assets. CTS is awesome and you really get many things of what you see on the store page.
     
  43. Rowlan

    Rowlan

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    Is there anything special that the authors need to do? I just did a quick test with Time of Day. That asset seems to work.

    cts - time of day.jpg

    Although I'm not happy with the over-brightness. But then again, this can be adjusted. Or is there anything special that the authors can achieve in addition to what's provided?
     
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  44. S4G4N

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    Like Gaia has the very powerful, yet much unexplored POI (Point of Interest) feature, this too is a BIG GEM for CTS
    Thanks for expanding on this
     
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  45. eaque

    eaque

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    gorgeous ! IMG_3505.JPG
     
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  46. eaque

    eaque

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    Hi,

    Previous pic is 4 textures terrain 512 res
    If i add up to 8 splat textures (or 16!!). Should i expect some fps loss ? or same fps until 16 textures as it is single pass?
     
  47. NatureManufacture

    NatureManufacture

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    The only difference will be more pixels to render for gpu. You shoudn't lose much fps or even you will not lose any fps;)
     
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  48. raja-naveen

    raja-naveen

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    Great, Thanks for clarification Adam. Excited for next update. Good luck.
     
  49. llJIMBOBll

    llJIMBOBll

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    Hi, How is the AMD update coming? I;ve not been able to use the shader yet. When will the update be ready? Thanx
     
  50. NatureManufacture

    NatureManufacture

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    There is no AMD issue. After My test, Adam test, Ampilify company test with pc / mac and AMD we didnt notice that something is wrong. Anyway we change few things and they tested changed version so error not exist or it have been fixed.
     
    Last edited: Jul 5, 2017
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