[FREE]MicroSplat, a modular terrain shading system for Unity Terrains

On a screenshot with microsplat enabled textures are like much less resolution than original.
It's a sand and pebbles 2K texture: without microsplat i can see sand and more details as it should be but with microsplat enabled it becomes like low resolution texture. I tried to set everything to max in microsplat config but nothing changed

 

Ahh my bad. 2018.3.4. What is the latest version its working with? 2018.2?

 

The texture resolution is set in the TextureArrayConfig, and in newer versions of Unity you can see the textures and resolution on the arrays themselves. So check the output on the arrays themselves and make sure they are not set to 1k.

 

I've tested in the latest version of Unity, you should be fine as long as your are on the latest MicroSplat and not running a beta Unity version.

 

Hi, trying to add a shadow mask for Vegetation Studio Pro but can't seem to find where to add it to Microsplat, have checked the material and the MicroSplatTerrain script but no shadow slots.

 

I believe Vegetation Studio sets this- there's a setup guide for this on the Vegetation Studio site..

 

Thank you very much

 

Thanks will take a look.

 

Great! With MegaSplat i use code like this to paint procedurally generated mesh terrain.. is there a way to do this in MicroSplat too?

Code (CSharp):

1.    if (megaSplat)
2.             {
3.                 c1 = new Color(light_v1, 0, 0, texture_v1 / 255f);
4.                 c2 = new Color(0, light_v2, 0, texture_v2 / 255f);
5.                 c3 = new Color(0, 0, light_v3, texture_v3 / 255f);
6.             }

 

Hi, can instancing be used with the mesh-terrain blending module? For large amounts of rocks, etc.

 

Ahh i just read the megasplat vs microsplat comparison.. looks like its a no go.. hopefully i can get megasplat working for android..

 

Yes, but it's stored in Unity's splat map format, which is one texture with 4 weights in the RGBA channels for every 4 textures on the terrain. You can use Unity's Terrain API for this, or if your doing this at runtime you can set it directly on the control maps unity generates to avoid the cost of using Unity's API.

 

Yes, but you'll need to make sure the required data is on each instance of the mesh. This is what the MicroSplatBlendableObject does, and with instancing that won't be present on every instance.

 

So this weekend I did some more research into a technique that was released a few months back. I had messed with it and discarded it, but this week Unity released their own version that made it much easier to evaluate the technique and not wonder which errors were mine and which were deficiencies of the technique.

While I'm most likely not adding this particular technique to MicroSplat, it did yield some interesting results, and lead me to come up with a variation on the idea which I think is much more suited to my needs. It's basically Texture Clustering, but without the need to author other textures.

I posted my results here:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/procedural-stochastic-texturing-prototype.628522/#post-4225696

Here's a clip from the post, comparing a tiled image to texture clusters with 3 layers, and my new technique which uses only one texture (partially based off the ideas presented in their technique).

Tiling Texture:


Texture Cluster, 3 textures:


Stochastic Height Blend (my new technique, only uses one texture):


I'll be shipping this in the next version of the Texture Cluster package. Hopefully monday, before I head to Guatamala to relax for a week.. Quality wise, Texture Clusters are still better, but this is one button and your done..

 

I don't know this a default behavior jbooth but i lose my layer textures on my terrain while syncing. I changed some code in MicroSplatTerrain script, so its working maybe for some other as well. But i have no idea this supposed to be, but i can paint now.

MicroSpaltTerrain.cs Line: 269

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. [..........]                
3. protos = new TerrainLayer[count];
4. for (int i = 0; i < count; ++i)
5.  {
6.                        //Old: string path = UnityEditor.AssetDatabase.GetAssetPath(cfg);
7.                             string path = UnityEditor.AssetDatabase.GetAssetPath(cfg).Replace("MicroSplatConfig.asset", "");
8.  
9.                             path = path.Replace("\\", "/");
10.                             path = path.Substring(0, path.LastIndexOf("/"));
11.                             //Old: path += "microsplat_layer_";
12.                             path += "/microsplat_layer_";
13. [..........]
14. }
15.  

 

So the code which is in my repository is:

string path = UnityEditor.AssetDatabase.GetAssetPath(cfg);
path = path.Replace("\\", "/");
path = path.Substring(0, path.LastIndexOf("/"));
path += "/microsplat_layer_";


I note that your "old" comment has += "microsplat_layer_" without the first /. Otherwise, the two would get the exact same result..

 

i was not able do edit my code (Spam timer).

Code (CSharp):

1. protos = new TerrainLayer[count];
2. for (int i = 0; i < count; ++i)
3. {
4.     //Old: string path = UnityEditor.AssetDatabase.GetAssetPath(cfg);
5.     string path =
6.     UnityEditor.AssetDatabase.GetAssetPath(cfg).Replace("MicroSplatConfig.asset", "");
7.  
8.     path = path.Replace("\\", "/");
9.     path = path.Substring(0, path.LastIndexOf("/"));
10.  
11.     //Old: path += "/microsplat_layer_";
12.     path += "microsplat_layer_";
13.  

 

Oh, might be a double slash screwing up windows.

 

Video on the new texture cluster stuff:

 

How many samplers does it require?

 

None.. it uses the ones it was using anyway.

 

excellent!

 

Ok, I need anti-tiling(repeating patterns) for my terrain textures. It would seem that your Anti-Tiling Techniques add-on for MS would be what I want. But after watching the Texture Clusters video above, that might work. So what would be better for me?

 

Depends on a few factors, and they can compliment each other too. I’m general, the Anti-tiling package contains more traditional and low cost techniques, while Texture Clusters has techniques of my own invention which are focused on the higher end of quality and cost. Previously one big difference was having to author texture variations, but the new technique doesn’t require that.

 

I have about half a dozen 8k PBR textures that I'm using for the terrain. They look good close up, but some have quite a bit of repeating patterns, while one is only noticeable from a distance. Which module would allow me to reduce the textures to 4k but still look good closeup?

BTW, enjoy your vacation!

 

Ha, either, but in different ways. Anti-Tile has several techniques which are based on introducing noise; detail texturing, which blends in grain up close to prevent blurry pixels, and noise normals, which uses a second normal texture to perturb the first one over a larger area, preventing the overall lighting of the surface from tiling. These are both effects which have been used for years in games.

With Texture Clusters, if you can author variations of your textures, then you could use 3 2k textures blended together to create a non-tiling surface which is the combination of all 3 surfaces. A noise texture is used to determine the weights of the texture, so this means that the point in which things repeat becomes very large, effectively creating a complex meta-surface from your three texture variations.

The stochastic method I just added allow it to do this without needing to have extra textures- it's not as high quality because, well, you have less texture data, but it looks pretty good considering. As far as I know, the Texture Clustering concept was invented with MegaSplat, and remains something that only my products do. And the stochastic mode I added is also unique, as the original paper used a very different (and complex) blending method.

Likely the best way to decide is to watch my videos on them, and see which one produces the kinds of looks your going for.

 

I love your work on terrains. Really something everyone needs!
(One day Unity will stop diddling with HDRP then it's time for me to buy all the microsplat modules, assuming you port!)

 

Let me know when that one day comes. They're still futzing with LWRP and not documenting the changes. With no general abstraction layer, and few customers, it becomes a hard sell to port any time soon.

 

Hey, Microsplat beginner here.

I added a new texture to the array and after pressing Update the textures don't show up in the Terrain layers.
I was able to do it with one texture but upon adding the second it seems to have glitched out somehow.
Any ideas how to fix this?



ps.
I saw in one of your videos you were using something called Vertex Paint (Megasplat video), should I refrain from using the native Terrain paint and use something else?

Regards.
H

 

I figured out that this was due to some redundant files in the MicroSplatData folder.
Deleting all the "microplat_layer_......" files and have them regenerated fixed it.

I'm pretty sure that these redundant files were created when I re-arranged the order of the textures in the Texture array.

 

Let me know if this happens again and what steps are causing it. I think there's still something funky in there with the new 2018.3 terrain stuff..

 

I went ahead and got some of the MicroSplat extensions... very promising so far!

That being said I get an error with the Tessellation and the Parallax.

Shader error in 'MicroSplat/Example_Tessellation': invalid subscript 'instanceID' at line 924 (on d3d11)

The Tessellation makes the camera partially clip the geometry and nothing happens to it visually. (See screenshot).
The Parallax seems to shift the texture a tiny bit to the sides when the height is adjusted.




Any idea on what could be the cause?

edit:
I created a new project just to try the Tessellation on a new terrain and I get the same error as soon as I imported the Tessellation extension asset.

Regards.
H

 

Do you have terrain instancing turned on in the terrain settings? Because Unity has a bug where tessellated surface shaders won't work with terrain instancing. I reported it a while back but have not heard back about it.

 

I turned off "Draw instanced" and the clipping went away.

The Tessellation effect does not impact the terrain though.

Could it be my materials? What should I look into?

 

Did you provide height maps for your textures?

 

Yes.. at least I thought I did. Flipping through the channels on the Mask provided with the PBR texture raised the terrain.

I'm using Megascans PBR and the Mask for the Height was set to use the wrong channel.

 

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but when I enable Stochastic it creates ugly lines on the terrain, almost like between the sampling points.

 

Does switching to the gradient sampler fix it? I might just need to force the gradient/lod samplers for this mode the same way I do for Per-Texture UV scale..

 

Yeah gradient sampling fixed it!

 

Hello

I'm playing around with the per texture brightness and contrast, but somehow i cannot get the desired results that I normally expect from a contrast. Normally in something like Photoshop, if I make the texture brighter, then I would also put up the contrast to the the darker parts "black" again. However with MS I cannot get a proper darkness back, just a grayish. Is there another setting or solution for this that I'm missing? Otherwise it seems like I have to edit the texture file in a photo editor.

Here's an example, this is the default:


now I would like it a bit brighter, but then I lose the dark parts, so I put up the contrast - but even at full contrast I lose the dark parts:


Many thanks

 

So, I'm prototyping a change that would remove keyword usage from MicroSplat. If your not aware, Unity has a limit of 256 keywords project wide for shaders. MicroSplat has never *actually* used keywords- because it doesn't use shader_feature or multi_compile, as it would completely blow up Unity's shader compiler if it did (ever notice how much of your build time is spent in compiling shader variants for other shaders, and how MicroSplat shaders are never in that list?). However, it stored what features were active in the shader keywords string[] on the material, mostly as a matter of convenience since it's the only arbitrary data you can easily write into a material.

The new system uses a scriptable object to hold the string[] instead; when MicroSplat loads, it automatically revisions the old data and removes the keywords. However, this presents a few challenges:

- At runtime, I need a way to query this data for a few features. The MicroSplatTerrain component now holds a reference to this scriptable object for this use.
- At runtime, I need a way to figure out if certain shaders are microsplat shaders. I used to search the keywords, but now I look for a string in the shaders internal name.
- 3rd party applications might be testing for shader keywords to detect MicroSplat shaders. I will contact the authors I know of and see if they are doing this. (I might leave a single keyword in for this use?).

Hopefully this will be an automatic and invisible conversion for people. But I figured I'd post this before I do the release of the next version.

 

I've been trying out the Wind add-on and it looks pretty good for the most part.
A problem though is when an area falls under shadow the wind highlights become very dark and it looks unnatural.



Is there a trick you know of to make it look more natural?

Regards.
H.

 

that would be hugely helpful, thanks!

 

Can you send me a repro (threres like 5 different lighting engines in Unity) so I can have a look?

 

Hello,

I just started using Microsplat, and I've tested both the Triplanar shader and the Global Texture shader. I'm seeing normal map issues with both when turning on Triplanar texturing and when using a Global Normal Map. I'm using a bubble normal map to debug how the normals are being lit by the sun, and it appears that the calculations are incorrect. This can be hard to identify with noisy normal maps mixed with albedo textures, so you have to use a gray albedo, and the bubble normal map to be able to see it.

Additionally I noticed the terrain isn't casting shadows even though the terrain mesh and the light are set to cast shadows.

Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated..

 

This is a continuation of my previous post since the forum only allows 5 image attachments..

 

So, a few things. If you have a global normal map and triplanar on at the same time, normals can be incorrect in some areas because the tangents are based on the triplanar mapping. You can't have two sets of tangents for a surface shader; and you either need to base the tangent off of the dominant triplanar projection (to have the triplanar normals correct) or base it off the terrain (to have the global normal be correct). I allow it, because as you mention, in many cases for what we're doing (terrain) you can get away with it and be ok.

Note that the global normal in MicroSplat is a blended normal (ie: blended into the terrain normal), rather than a normal replacement (which is what some other shaders do, reading the normal from a texture so the shading stays consistent through LODs). Not sure what you exact use case is here.

As for the shadows, I'd double check your lighting settings and perhaps look in the frame debugger under the shadow pass and see if there's some reason it's not getting drawn.

 

Hi @jbooth

Do you perhaps have any feedback on the contrast issue?
https://forum.unity.com/threads/fre...or-unity-terrains.487458/page-42#post-4260724

Thank you!

 

Actually, I may have a way around this in the next version- I was working on something similar for a job I'm doing, and needed to have tangents correct for multiple mappings like this..

 

Right now contrast is applied before brightness, which might be causing the issue. If you go into microsplat_terrain_body.txt around line 420 and swap this:

Code (CSharp):

1. #if _PERTEXBRIGHTNESS || _PERTEXCONTRAST || _PERTEXPOROSITY || _PERTEXFOAM
2.             SAMPLE_PER_TEX(ptBC, 3.5, config, half4(1, 1, 1, 1));
3.             #if _PERTEXCONTRAST
4.                samples.albedo0.rgb = saturate(((samples.albedo0.rgb - 0.5) * ptBC0.g) + 0.5);
5.                samples.albedo1.rgb = saturate(((samples.albedo1.rgb - 0.5) * ptBC1.g) + 0.5);
6.                #if !_MAX2LAYER
7.                  samples.albedo2.rgb = saturate(((samples.albedo2.rgb - 0.5) * ptBC2.g) + 0.5);
8.                #endif
9.                #if !_MAX3LAYER || !_MAX2LAYER
10.                   samples.albedo3.rgb = saturate(((samples.albedo3.rgb - 0.5) * ptBC3.g) + 0.5);
11.                #endif
12.             #endif
13.             #if _PERTEXBRIGHTNESS
14.                samples.albedo0.rgb = saturate(samples.albedo0.rgb + ptBC0.rrr);
15.                samples.albedo1.rgb = saturate(samples.albedo1.rgb + ptBC1.rrr);
16.                #if !_MAX2LAYER
17.                   samples.albedo2.rgb = saturate(samples.albedo2.rgb + ptBC2.rrr);
18.                #endif
19.                #if !_MAX3LAYER || !_MAX2LAYER
20.                   samples.albedo3.rgb = saturate(samples.albedo3.rgb + ptBC3.rrr);
21.                #endif
22.             #endif
23.             #if _PERTEXPOROSITY
24.             porosity = BlendWeights(ptBC0.b, ptBC1.b, ptBC2.b, ptBC3.b, heightWeights);
25.             #endif
26.  
27.             #if _PERTEXFOAM
28.             streamFoam = BlendWeights(ptBC0.a, ptBC1.a, ptBC2.a, ptBC3.a, heightWeights);
29.             #endif
30.  
31.          #endif

for this:

Code (CSharp):

1. #if _PERTEXBRIGHTNESS || _PERTEXCONTRAST || _PERTEXPOROSITY || _PERTEXFOAM
2.             SAMPLE_PER_TEX(ptBC, 3.5, config, half4(1, 1, 1, 1));
3.          
4.             #if _PERTEXBRIGHTNESS
5.                samples.albedo0.rgb = saturate(samples.albedo0.rgb + ptBC0.rrr);
6.                samples.albedo1.rgb = saturate(samples.albedo1.rgb + ptBC1.rrr);
7.                #if !_MAX2LAYER
8.                   samples.albedo2.rgb = saturate(samples.albedo2.rgb + ptBC2.rrr);
9.                #endif
10.                #if !_MAX3LAYER || !_MAX2LAYER
11.                   samples.albedo3.rgb = saturate(samples.albedo3.rgb + ptBC3.rrr);
12.                #endif
13.             #endif
14. #if _PERTEXCONTRAST
15.                samples.albedo0.rgb = saturate(((samples.albedo0.rgb - 0.5) * ptBC0.g) + 0.5);
16.                samples.albedo1.rgb = saturate(((samples.albedo1.rgb - 0.5) * ptBC1.g) + 0.5);
17.                #if !_MAX2LAYER
18.                  samples.albedo2.rgb = saturate(((samples.albedo2.rgb - 0.5) * ptBC2.g) + 0.5);
19.                #endif
20.                #if !_MAX3LAYER || !_MAX2LAYER
21.                   samples.albedo3.rgb = saturate(((samples.albedo3.rgb - 0.5) * ptBC3.g) + 0.5);
22.                #endif
23.             #endif
24.             #if _PERTEXPOROSITY
25.             porosity = BlendWeights(ptBC0.b, ptBC1.b, ptBC2.b, ptBC3.b, heightWeights);
26.             #endif
27.  
28.             #if _PERTEXFOAM
29.             streamFoam = BlendWeights(ptBC0.a, ptBC1.a, ptBC2.a, ptBC3.a, heightWeights);
30.             #endif
31.  
32.          #endif

then regenerate the shader by changing some option on it, let me know if this works. If it does, then I expect that's the order we want- however, I wonder if I'd mess some peoples settings up by changing it?