CTS - Complete Terrain Shader - Deprecated

this is how the terrain is shown in the inspector, but the textures are shown in the terrain.

https://imgur.com/ZCFpgQe

and this is how mapmagic puts the textures:

https://imgur.com/vi50DcU

But MapMagic doesn't find any textures on the actual terrain so it can't use them for exclude rules etc. (so it doesn't spawn grass on specific textures for example).

 

From your screenshot it looks like there are indeed no terrain layers on your terrain. CTS can still display those textures from its internal texure array then, but other tools that try to read the textures from the terrain will fail.

Which tool is your main tool to add textures to the terrain? In your setup you can use

MapMagic
Vegetation Studio
CTS (by applying a pre-defined profile)
or you can add the textures manually

Then beginning from that tool, when you add the textures to the terrain with this tool, do they appear on the terrain as terrain layers? If yes, Map Magic & Vegetation studio should be able to pick them up accordingly so you can use them in your rules. If not, we need to take a deeper look into the tool in question why it does not add the textures as terrain layers properly.

 

MapMagic with CSO (Custom Shader Output) is how I put the textures in the terrain using CTS with a CTS profile I created, and the textures not appearing to the terrain, which verified by wright in MapMagic thread. Now what I m trying to do is to get the textures from VSPro so I can use them as exclude rules

 

Thanks for the clarification, I read what wright posted in the other thread and assume Map Magic creates the output for CTS in a special way so it bypasses putting the textures on the terrain and populating the terrain data splatmap, so therefore VS can't find them. I created a post over in the MapMagic thread to find a solution for you together with wright.

 

Yes I read it, awesome, thank you.

 

Why not use it? but HDRP uses CTS2019.....

 

Which version of the HDRP & Rendering Core package did you install? CTS requires version 4.8 of those, if you installed a different version it is recommended to fully uninstall HDRP and the Core RP Package, then install it in version 4.8.
After you installed the HDRP & Core package you also need to create a HD Render Pipeline Asset and assign it in the Project Graphics settings to enable HDRP for your project.

 

Thank you. You've been a great help already.

 

Hi,

i get the following Shader error

Can anyone help me?

 

Are you planning to use HDRP in your project? If yes, which version of the HDRP & Core rendering package do you have installed? CTS requires version 4.8 of those, if you installed a different version it is recommended to fully uninstall HDRP and the Core RP Package, then install it in version 4.8.

 

Thx a Lot, worked for me =)

 

My current project uses CTS. If I buy and install CTS 2019, will I have to reconfigure my CTS setting from scratch?

 

No, you should be able to use the same profiles in CTS 2019. If you are still on CTS version 1.8 or below, It is recommended to delete the old CTS folder before the installation. If you store your CTS profiles inside the old CTS folder, you would need to copy them elsewhere before you delete the folder of course.

 

Thanks!

 

A big part of why I updated my project to 2018.3 is performance gains from terrain instanced drawing that was promised by Unity. So now, when I finally have ability to test it, it's very disappointing to see that on both of my PCs instanced drawing didn't affected FPS in any way. Even when I set resolution to something ridiculously low.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

Has anyone noticed any performance gains from instanced drawing?

 

Is there a way to set tessellation distances & density per texture?

 

No, the density decides the additional polygons that are being created on the terrain mesh through tessellation, and this is evenly across the terrain, not per texture. What you can change is how much each textures heightmap influences the extra geometry with the "Heightmap Tess Depth" Slider.

 

In LWRP, why does CTS 2019 Basic Type not display lightmap???

 

It's like the reason for opening this option. I'm not sure...

 

Hi, I looked at this and I was able to reproduce the issue as well. It seems that this is a bug in the LWRP and HDRP shader types. Both seem to ignore baked lighting when "Draw Instanced" is active. The CTS "Draw Instanced" setting is the same as setting "Draw Instanced" in the Unity terrain options. We will look into this together with shader development to see what is going on.

 

In unity 2018.2.6f1 CTS started in one terrain(but i dont want to start over) show thos white dots, it looks like parts of terrain with white albedo. it looks like it have normals. the only fix i can find for it is to change advance shader to any other. but i want to use advance shader. what can i do?

 

the white dots move around when i paint texture(splat map)

 

I found it, if anyone else look for it. it was Snow settings

 

Glad you were able to find the solution! The snow in CTS has a lot of settings to configure it, with a combination of extreme settings it is possible that it comes out glitchy / ugly like in your picture.

 

Wait, @AdamGoodrich , does CTS fully support HDRP 2018.3? and if so is tessellated terrain working?

 

CTS does fully support HD SRP v 4.8 on 2018.3, however it is still subject to the limitations of the underlying terrain system / HD SRP. As such I think the maximum textures per terrain is limited to 8 textures, and tessellation is not yet supported by HD SRP / Unity terrain.

 

That's a shame, I'm looking for a way to tessellate my terrain in HDRP right now to give it a much-needed edge. Will have to try something else, although I will be tempted to pick CTS up at some other point.

 

As anyone see this issue before. I was deleting some shaders in my project and then this happen.
I imported the newest version of CTS. purple going across my terrain. Purple usually means a missing shader?
Can't be anything to do with CTS cause I imported a fresh copy. CTS is working perfectly.




Edit:
I figured it out its caused from a reflection probe being messed up on a model.

 

Weird!

 

Can this problem be fixed for a long time?

 

Yes we will try to fix that in new version.

 

Hello!
I am fairly new to CTS and have a few questions. Sadly I can't seem to really google-foo forth answers about CTS so easily on my own as I seem to always end up on one of the posts in this thread where one of my keywords have been used in some sentence, in some post. Sorry if these are extremely basic and have been asked tens of times before, I tried to look over previous posts but could not find any matching my questions.

1. I have some problems applying smoothness to some of my textures/terrain layers. The ones with only a metallic/smoothness map in them do not get any smoothness, regardless of the multiplier. Any advice?

2. When two textures meet I seem to get a noticeable darkening along the seam. Any advice?

For some further info, I am using Unity 2018.3.7f1 with CTS 2019 downloaded a few days ago. Images are attached below.

Thanks for the read!

 

Hmm, the settings in your profile do seem correct, it is strange that you don't see any smoothness on the terrain. Could you please try to place a point light over the area to make sure the smoothness is just not visible due to lighting conditions? If that does not help, could you please check if the smoothness works in the swamp demo scene that comes with CTS? (Just try to increase the smoothness on the grass texture there, the terrains should start to look like it is made out of glass soon...)
Another factor that can influence smoothness are reflection probes, do you have any reflection probes set up in that scene? In the "Light" GameObject in the Swamp Demo Scene there is a Reflection Probe set up for that terrain, if you deactivate the probe you can see the influence it has on the smoothness display on the terrain.
If smoothness is working fine in the CTS demo scene, but not on your own terrain, can you compare the texture import settings of your own textures with the ones that are used in the demo scene? We had a few cases were import settings on the textures would prevent correct function of some CTS features.

Are you using a 3rd party tool by any chance to create the splatmaps?
The only time I have seen something similar was when you would not use the terrain splatmap system but instead provide your own splatmap texture for the CTS shader which was set up to be a Color texture in the texture import settings.

 

Hey Peter, thanks for the reply!

I forgot to mention in my last post that I do bake my lighting and reflections and that my terrain is set to be both lightmap and reflection probe static. In case any of that would affect CTS in any way.

I've had a poke around with your suggestions. I do have reflection probes in the scene, quite a few. I've tried disabling them, however, it did not yield any result. For good measure, I tried to disable the light probe group as well but it did not do anything either. I tried to place a real-time point light above the terrain but again it does not seem to do anything. The texture does work however if I place the metallic map in the roughness slot or if I have a roughness map. I can't really do this as a solution though as this causes my seam to become extremely shiny. Similar to my second issue from my last post.

I did try to open the Swamp example and it worked just fine. (Cool terrain btw)

As for your question regarding my splat maps, no, not as far as I am aware of. The only things I am using in conjunction with the default Unity 2018.3 terrain is CTS, unless there is something from the trees I've imported and placed around with the terrain tree tools or with AQUAS.

Once again, a few pictures below, thanks!

 

@PWPeter Also, not sure if this is related, but I seem to be unable to "blend" textures when painting. Either they are more or less non-existent or they are at 90-100% on top. I've been poking around further, might my issues come from the fact that my terrain is simply too big and that the splatmap, even though made by unity itself, is just stretched out too much? In my scene I have 1 terrain that is 1000x1000 with a splatmap (terrain control texture) with a resolution of 2048.

 

This is interesting, from your previous thread I assumed you would get no smoothness regardless of which mask you use, but it works if you supply a roughness mask? This is very odd - smoothness basically just is inverted roughness, so it seems very strange to me that the one method of providing the mask is working, while the other isn't.
Some more things you could try in this regard:
Can you try to add the smoothness in the alpha channel of the albedo channel? This should work as well and is also the way it is handled for the CTS demo scenes.
Another thing you could try is to use one of the heightmaps that come with CTS in the smoothness field, for example the texture "T_Ground_Stylized_Rock_04_H". Of course a heightmap is not a smoothness map and it will not fit your texture, but the idea is to check if any other grayscale image works for you in that slot.
Last but not least you could try to copy one of the CTS texture sets that is proven to be working on your terrain to include it in your profile to see if that works.

I noticed that you were using textures from textures.com in your blending example so I downloaded the same textures to see if I would get the same blending result and I'm getting the darker borders as well:

I need to check back with Shader development if this is a general bug / issue with the CTS Basic shader. (The advanced shader type does not show this issue so you can switch to that if it is possible for you)
This issue is only visible that strong if you have a very short area of intersection between your textures, which brings me to the next issue:

Your control texture resolution vs. terrain resolution should be fine, the problem with manual painting on the terrain in unity 2018.3 and above is that unity removed the "target strength" slider in the brush selection which makes it difficult to draw on a texture at the desired strength.
To compensate and to get a smoother transition between two texture types you can try to select one of the smoother brush types and a low brush opacity and then draw the textures on with multiple clicks carefully. The circle on the left has been drawn at 100% opacity, the one on the right with 10% and clicking multiple times:

 

I am having trouble with removing unused textures from my terrain, the existing textures painted on terrain get replaced by others, seemingly at random, sometimes even the one I just removed. Can this be caused by CTS? what would be the correct way to remove an unused texture from a terrain?

 

The correct way would be to remove the textures from the terrain, then select the CTS profile and click "Bake Textures" at the bottom. This will update the internal texture array of CTS so that the texture is removed there as well, until that is done it can happen that you "paint with the wrong texture" when there is a mismatch between the number of textures on the terrain vs. in the CTS profile.

 

@PWPeter Hello again, thank you for going so far in helping answer my questions with the detailed answers!
Also, apologies for a slightly delayed answer, some other things needed to be taken care of in the build.

So, as is beginning to become my catchphrase in this thread, I had some more pokes around.

The first thing I wanted to ask you, you (and I think Adam in the CTS intro tutorials mention it at some point as well) that CTS internally takes the smoothness or roughness map and shuffles it into the alpha of the base color map. My question, what are you expecting input-wise from the metallic smoothness/roughness map? Does it need to have RGB channels for this all to function? Because I noticed that the muddy puddles textures I was testing with only has an alpha channel, or rather I have set its format to "alpha 8" because its R,G and B channels if left on automatic are all empty. I am only asking to get to know for future reference, I have tried now to set the texture back to automatic and use it in the smoothness map and it was still not working.

As an addition, I am writing this post as I go so sorry that it's a little back and forth and all over the place, I'm now able to sit down and have a better look at this. What I've now found is that my metallic map is not really working at all, no matter if I am using it in the smoothness or roughness channel. As an explainer, by adding the metallic map to the smoothness channel I get nothing, however, after removing the normal map form the shader I can now see that by adding the map into the roughness channel all I am getting is a completely glassy finish. The map is at least giving me smoothness but it's not controlling it at all, just getting it to be completely smooth all over.

Slightly unrelated ramble here while I am going back and forth between the forum to write my response and check in unity to make sure what I am writing is correct, is it a bug that whenever I bake my textures in CTS or when I open my CTS profile by double-clicking the tab from the component on my terrain my project panel search gets wiped? It's a little frustrating
Anyways, back on topic!

I tried to add the metallic map into the alpha of the base color map using this channel packer for unity (https://github.com/andydbc/unity-texture-packer) and it, unfortunately, had no effect. The texture remained smoothness-less.

I also had a try with the texture you suggested and it does seem to work. As it is a heightmap being forced into a smoothness slot I am kinda expecting it to behave weirdly but I figured it add it in here as well just in case its the "wrong kind of wired". When adding the height map in the smoothness goes from a glass finish which is the default, to a matte finish, almost as if the map does not work. However, turning up the smoothness dial to 2 gets me back to a completely glassy finish, again, almost like the map has not really worked, but, when I turn the dial further, to 4 I start getting some sort of pattern and nuance in the smoothness. Worth noting here is that when having the proper metallic map in the smoothness or roughness slot, this never happens. No matter how far I turn the dial I never see any patterns, just a solid no smoothness or a solid glass finish.
So it does seem to work, just behaving strangely, as one would expect when to use a heightmap in a smoothness slot, like fitting a square peg in a round hole.

I'm not entirely sure what you are asking for with your last suggestion:

Could you maybe elaborate?

As for the texture blending thing, I see, kinda annoying that they removed that control. I have been using your tip of having the brush only be 10-25% opacity and clicking, however, I still get the issue where the texture just stays either completely invisible or almost completely invisible even after two or three clicks and then suddenly just appears at almost 100% opacity, both with the more "splatty" looking brushes (my favorites), but also with the softer round ones. The problem seems to come mostly for me if I have a base layer, then paint something on top of it and then want to layer in a third texture/terrainlayer, so the conflict happens between the second and third textures/terrainlayers. This is why I thought getting a higher res splatmap might help with the transitions of the textures, but maybe this is just a limit of the unity terrain system as it is now since I have had this issue since before I started using CTS?

Anyways, thanks again for the help, sorry for the ramble and the long-winded reply. Below are some images from my testing with the smoothness. Maybe you'd like a copy of the textures I am testing with? If so please tell me and I'll PM them to you.

 

Yes, the smoothness / roughness maps need to have rgb channels, because the "strength" of the mask on each pixel is is determined by reading the rgb-value.
If in doubt in regards to the channels / import settings, you can compare your texture to these settings, these should work for a smoothness / roughness mask:

This is unfortunately Unity editor default behavoir, by double clicking on something in a reference field the thing gets selected, and you lose the project search entry. If you click on the small lock icon in the top right corner next to the project tab, it should at least keep your search result available though.

From this description I would assume that your problem should be related to the import settings of your metallic map texture. Can you please compare the import settings with the settings I posted above? It should normally make no difference, but in which file format is the non-working texture?

I wanted you to test if it works for you if you add a pbr texture set from the CTS demo scene to your terrain, e.g. if you add the grass albedo & normal from the swamp demo scene. But with the other test showing that CTS does seem to react to a texture in the smoothness slot after all I think it is only the question of supplying the correct mask texture.

If all of the above fails then it would be great if you could PM me the textures so I can test with them directly.

 

does cts still not support instanced? using 2018.3

thanx

 

We released CTS 2019 a while back ago, which adds support for instancing and scripted rendering pipelines (HDRP / LWRP), please see here for the announcement and the reasoning behind the separate product: https://forum.unity.com/threads/cts-complete-terrain-shader.477615/page-45#post-4272187

 

I give up.

I have done everything that can be done.
He had a scene with a terrain of 16x16 km
With CTS 1.8
With 9 Textures.
With Unity 2018.3.13f1

I do a backup of my scene.
I delete the CTS folder.
Restart Unity
I install CTS 2019.
Restart Unity.

From there, I tried to recover the profile created in version 1.8 (and it has cost me a lot to do and fine tune) and it is impossible.

The textures in TERRAIN are. The textures in the CTS profile are. But in the scene all appear smooth, like mirrors.

I have tried to change parameters and nothing.

I think it's try number 10-11 and, really, I give up. Impossible.

 

Sorry to hear you are having such a negative experience with CTS. When you say the textures are on the terrain and in the profile - can you still see them as individual textures on the terrain, or is it all one - large mirror like surface? Can you maybe post a screenshot if possible?
From your description it sounds like it is an issue with smoothness, did you check the profile and per-texture smoothness if it has any unusual high value? You could also try to rebake the textures if you have not done that yet.
Another possible issue could be the CTS weather manager: The weather manager adjusted per-texture smoothness in v1.8, in v1.9 or 2019 it adjusts the global profile smoothness instead. It could be that the settings crank up the profile smoothness to a very high value in your scene.
If that does not help yet, could you please try to open a new scene, create a new terrain from the scene hierarchy create menu, then select
Window > Procedural Worlds > CTS > Add CTS to terrain
After that can you please select one of the existing CTS profiles in the
Procedural Worlds\CTS\Textures Library\Profile Library folder, and then click "Apply Profile" at the bottom of the profile? It would be interesting to see if you get the same issue on a fresh terrain with an existing CTS profile as well.

 

How many keywords does it use? After upgrato CTS 2019 I get lots of red keywords limitation errors.

 

Can you post the errors you are getting? When you are using HDRP / LWRP, please note that you need to use HDRP / LWRP version 4.8 with CTS at the moment, other versions will create compilation issues for the shaders.

 

It seems CTS 2019 uses a lot more keywords than previous version.

 

I just compared the basic & advanced shader types, CTS 2019 uses one keyword more to support instancing. CTS Basic uses 3 keywords in v1.9 and 4 keywords in 2019
Advanced uses 4 keywords in v.19 and 5 keywords in 2019

Can you please try to restart your unity editor, there are threads out there that it might be an issue / bug with unity where it displays this message even though your limit has not really exceeded, e.g.:
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/FPSSample/issues/13
https://forum.unity.com/threads/maximum-number-of-shader-keywords-exceeded.602620/
https://forum.unity.com/threads/maximum-number-256-of-shader-keywords-exceeded.573367/

 

But it looks a lot more. Please take a look at below pic.



Edit: It solved when I removed HDRP/LWRP folders. Please put those shaders inside a zip file for people like me who don't use HDRP/LWRP

 

@AdamGoodrich Now that ive been using CTS for a while now. Having only 2 stage distance mixing isn't enough. Needs at least 3. 3 be perfect really.
For example LOD's. Thats why LOD"s are usually at least 3 stages.

With only a close and far view there is a big gap somewhere around 15 to % 25% from the near view setting.

I want super small tiles up close and huge tile far away. When my character is about 60 units away the big tiles are to blurry cause thats what i have the distance set at of course. But thats the distance I need to maintain how I want less than 60 to look.

Its a pretty large issue.