CTS - Complete Terrain Shader - Deprecated

Some assets will be published for specific Unity versions, so downloading v1.5.0 with Unity 5.6.5 might give you a different package than downloading v1.5.0 with Unity 2017.3. If you have multiple versions installed, they all still download to the same folder.

 

phew, this was a stressfull weekend. I finally managed it to compile! Thank you mattis89 for helping in testing it on your machines. This was the reason why I did not gave up entirely. The fact you said that it should work for sure made me think hard. TY for that! So it is maybe an issue with my workstation or win10 or a driver...the usual suspects.
I removed the OC from my CPU und GPU just to make sure it doesnt f**k with the shader compiler compute. PC was working fine on full load tho. - until 8 or more shader compile processes made it crash over and over again.

At the End (a long night later) I moved everything (Unity+Project) to an SSD and after about 20 shader compile attempts....ONE was successfull! After that I tried it 5 times more and ALL of them were successfull...I do not fully understand the reasons but Im enjoying CTS with full force now

Maybe it was the HD..or the OC or Windows or who knows...now its working fine!

@MrG: thx for the url!

 

I did not do much yet with scripting for CTS, but I think the issue is that you are generating an empty, new CTS profile in your code and then you are broadcasting it to the terrain. Since the profile does not contain any terrain textures, it removes all textures from the terrain.

Can you try assigning a CTS profile that already contains some terrain textures from your asset folder? If that works, you could either keep working with "pre-defined" profiles that sit in your asset folder, or look into adding terrain textures to the CTS profile from script before assigning it to the terrain.

 

Hello i consider buying this asset. Does it work with terraincomposer 2?

 

CTS takes care of the rendering/shading of the terrain, but does not care how the terrain was created. As long as you have an Unity standard terrain with a splatmap, you can use CTS to render it. I do not own Terrain Composer, but there are multiple posts in this thread where people mentioned there are no issues with TC2 + CTS:

post-3284824
post-3147005
post-3131893

 

Thank you, i thought so but I had to be sure. CTS is hereby purchased!

 

Hey guys so i am looking at the tutorials and when attempting to use the advanced shader I get some options that I don't see in the video:



In particular Smoothness and Roughness. I am not 100% sure what to put into these fields is this something you can help me with?

 

For all you terrain and vegetation artists...some inspiration

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=859761094173556

 

Yea I've been scratching my head beacuse of that too.. roughness is maybe "Metal" texture..? Smoothness is maybe ... I dont know.. google it? It might just be different names...

 

Unity has a nice explanation for the concept of smoothness for the standard shader. In a nutshell, the smoothness value defines how 'shiny' a surface looks like when light is being reflected from it. If you want some only some areas of your texture to be shiny, for example if you have a texture with a puddle of water on asphalt, you can add a smoothness texture map in CTS. Here is an example picture of a stone tile texture with a smoothness map applied:

Spoiler

You can see that the stones reflect the light differently than the "filling" between the stones, which looks kinda like you would expect it in real life.

The smoothness texture map you provide needs to be dark/black in the areas where you want the texture not to be shiny, and bright/white where you want it to reflect the light.

Roughness is the opposite of smoothness and just a different way to provide a map to define which parts of the texture should be shiny and which not.

One of the features of CTS is to increase the global smoothness of all textures at the same time, so you can make your terrain look wet when it rains.

 

Have you ever downloaded a texture from gametextures.com?

if so there is a map called Gloss and not smoothness do you know if that is what you put into the smoothness field?

 

Argh, you hit my weak spot in graphic processing knowledge. You deal 200 damage. I'm not 100% sure, but as far as I know a gloss map is the exact same thing as a smoothness map, just a different name, you should be able to use it as a smoothness map for CTS.

The problem with all these terms is, there are multiple expressions when describing the light reflections on a surface:

Smoothness / Roughness / Metallic / Specular / Gloss (and maybe Normals come into play as well)

There are different rendering / shading techniques that make different use of these values in their workflow, often in combination with each other, which makes it confusing to understand & explain. I do not 100% understand the exact difference between these as well, maybe someone with a background in graphics processing can give a good explanation about those.

The good thing is even if you don't 100% understand the difference between those values, you can set up a flat terrain, apply CTS and some textures, add a directional light so that it will reflect on the terrain towards the camera, and then experiment with different smoothness maps and CTS values until you are satisfied how it looks.

Spoiler

 

Hello,

Currently having an issue with tessellation. Once applied and I increase the Heightmap Tess Depth I start to get black spots in between the tessellated parts.

I am using it along side Enviro, now when I turn Enviro off and just used a directional light I don't get this problem. I am barely increasing the Tess Depth before this starts to happen.

 

This is a handy hack for 'non standard' terrain textures. Unity by default has smoothness in the alpha channel on terrain albedo textures.

If you are using textures from non standard sources, this information is not there, so I added in the option to bake it for you. If you have a smoothness / gloss texture then use in smooth box, and alternatively a roughness texture then drop it in the roughness box. CTS bakes these textures into the albedo for you.

No idea why enviro would cause this - perhaps reach out to its author. I use enviro a lot and have not ever noticed it.. however I don't use tesselation that much - and when i do I treat it like a normal map - just a very small amount to add a little more interest.

I am deep in a project that finishes early next week - we will push out a new CTS release shortly after that. For those of you having issues with compilation in Unity 2018, i made a post on how to fix them about 3 weeks ago.

 

It happends the same to me and I have Enviro too..

 

Here is an image of what it does at a low amount https://imgur.com/a/t4C5F

 

Terrain shadows try this post it might help some

https://forum.unity.com/threads/gai...nd-scene-creation.327342/page-71#post-2490010

 

I saw you wrote that the support of emissive is on the roadmap...when will this be scheduled?
If it is not scheduled soon, could you give instructions how to add it to the shader manually?

 

Any news about parallax mapping in CTS Adam?

 

I am becoming the squeaky wheel here but ....

Adam, any word on the terrain hole painting system you said would be out shortly quite some time ago?

 

If you need to have a working hole painting solution that modifys the shader of your choice so you can paint with the desired texture and it becomes transparent "a hole" hit me up in pm

 

@syscrusher I am trying to use TC2 with CTS. When I select and apply any of the demo profiles and try to apply to my terrain which was generated from a WM RAW import into TC2. I only seem to get the first texture applied to the entire terrain. I saw earlier in the thread you successfully used both Together.

Any suggestions for me?

 

I'll have to revisit this to give you an answer. I did it in a test scene that I no longer have on hand. It may be a day or two before I can replicate my setup, due to work responsibilities combined with a case of the flu. (Yeah, those are yucky things together.)

Please bump me with a PM if I haven't gotten back to you by Tuesday evening. I have to work late tomorrow (Monday) and may not get to do any Unity then.

 

In the meantime I have tossed TC2 and reloaded CTS for a clean start (2017.3.1f1) @AdamGoodrich When looking at the demo scene I see this



Game view looks fine

 

I forgot to mention an issue I came across a few months ago. I was using AQUAS water with a terrain using CTS the underwater caustics pattern is super tiny and the texture clips into the parts where the material uses a height map. I think the caustics use a projector.

 

Scratches head... only thing i can think of is that your camera is far away from the scene and fog is blocking the view.

 

That was exactly the issue - Thank You

 

Hello,

I have huge performance on one of my config GTX 560 with the "Advanced" Shader.
30 fps difference when I switch from Unity to Advanced.

I did a FrameDebbugger, and I though the shader was doing everything in 1 pass.
But I have 4....



I got the 3 and 4, that's fine, LOD pass for futher distance.
But is it possible to get rid of 1 and 2 ?

Thanks

 

I'm bumping myself on this. I haven't forgotten, but the past several nights in a row I have worked at my job until about 4:00 a.m., so I haven't had time to do this. I finished that project (a technical analysis for a customer, 196 pages and 65800 words) at about 4:15 this morning, so I should finally get my life back and have some time for this testing in the next couple of days. Sorry for the delay.

 

Yeah, fog issues like that are really tricky in Scene View because the skybox isn't fogged out, so you don't realize what's going on. Good catch!

 

From a pure CTS perspective - if you have strip textures turned on in your profile - then you will only get 1 terrain pass regardless of amount of textures you use. So check that - if it is turned on then your extra passes are coming from something else.

I verified this in the profiler as I was developing it - and you get a lovely reduction in draw calls.

 

Btw... you should get a difference ... our advanced shader is doing a lot more work than the unity shader... so its going to consume more resources to render.

The differences tend to even out the more textures you chuck at it - as we do 1 pass rendering, and unity shader does 1 extra pass for every set of 4 additional textures.

 

I compared CTS with MicroSplat and found out that MicroSplat is 20% faster in a compareable configuration.
Regarding the performance and the lack of support (see the open questions above about features) I will switch to MicroSplat.

 

You are supposed to send support questions to support ticket system located on the website....and a update its on the way for CTS.

 

Hello how much texture your system support?
I need at least 32

 

This is from page one of this forum.

They are both working very hard right now on new assets close to release for Unity.
If you want an answer for sure go here >>

Support:

For support go to https://proceduralworlds.freshdesk.com/support/home. These request are tracked and most responses happen within 24 hours. There is also a knowledge base on the support system so chances are your question has already been answered.

 

16

 

After using CTS Shader, should i set enabled off ?
It looks like there is no difference, after applying CTS to the terrain, but the loading range is quite different, if i let CTS Terrain Shader applied.
Is it true, that i would turn enabled off, or am i wrong ?

 

Hey there, I am trying to use this with World Creator Pro but every time I add a texture in World Creator, it shows up there and in the inspector, but when I go to bake it in CTS it never adds it to the list of CTS shaders. It worked fine when using Gaia, how can I get it to pull properly from World Creator?

 

Your call. If you want the benefit of 1 pass shading you will need to leave it on as it strips textures at runtime.

Not really sure as I don't use it.

CTS requires a 'normal' unity terrain with all textures to be present in your terrain when it bakes, so as long as they are not doing something unusual then it should just work.

Perhaps someone in the community who uses it can comment.

 

Trying to add a fifth texture to one of my terrain tiles. I used Gaia to originally apply textures. Now when I add any texture (even standard textures) they paint on black. I try toi bake the textures but nothing happens. The CTS profile stays at four textures. What am I missing here?

 

Hmm, from my experience CTS should update the profile with the textures that are currently used on the terrain, no matter how they were added. Some things you could try:

• Just to make sure: new textures are usually collapsed in the profile, did you overlook the new texture by any chance because it does not display its settings in the list of textures until you click on it?
  
• Can you try to create a new CTS profile via Component > CTS > Create and Apply Profile?
• Can you try to reproduce the issue with a fresh, empty scene?
• Do you get any errors in the console when baking the textures?

 

Thanks for the help. I went through the list you provided. The texture list isn't collapsed, and I've clicked all textures. Create and apply profile didn't do anything either. No errors either.

What did work was your suggestion to replicate it on another scene. The textures still paint as black, but I could bake the textures into the profile. From there I would apply and it worked fine. I'm not sure what's causing it to bug out, but at least there is a workaround. Whenever I need to add a new texture I will go to my test scene, bake the texture into the profile there, then reapply the profile in my working scene.

Thanks for the help!

 

Any eta on a version compatible with 2018 beta?

 

Regarding the CTS multiple terrain demo, I can't find anything in the documentation of CTS or Gaia that gives a hint as to how the terrains were produced so that they would fit together side by side so perfectly. Did that start as a huge terrain that was sliced up in Gaia somehow and then shaded in CTS? Any info on how to accomplish that is greatly appreciated.

 

Maybe check here, look in the show more. I am not 100 % sure but NatureManufacture
Gives a link for a free terrain slicer

The link given there is this http://kostiantyn-dvornik.blogspot.de/2013/12/unity-split-terrain-script.html

Giving both just in case you want to look yourself for the links..

 

yes a free ones is there as well. its NOT his, but he shows the info to get it, and it works great.

 

Gaia 1 didn't have a slicer, i'm sure that will be addressed in the future . But Adam and Bart who made World Streamer work together. . World Streamer, i been using for years, if your're looking for multi tile med, to larger worlds....

But that terrain was created as one typically and split later. when finished, which is commonly done that way.

 

Hi all, can someone show me right process to apply cts to a mesh....scratching my head...
thanks in advance

 

Yes sorry I had forgot to say it was a link to a free terrain splicer and not his asset.. I did it that way because some people don't like just a link, just in case. Thanks for clarifying that point.

I did not mean to infer that it was his. Only that it could be a trusted link was how i meant it