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

Let's hope this time I am not asking another dumb question, but here goes: I need to play with the transparency of the multiple textures being applied on my terrain. In the below example, I want those "gray stains" (obtained with the noise setttings from the procedural texturing module) to be more transparent, or more blurrily blended on the underneath terrain. Using the per texture settings, I tried to play with the "interpolation contrast" setting and with the alpha value of the tint, but it does nothing. How can I achieve that?

 

Well first realize that things are not alpha blended, but height map blended - meaning it favors one texture winning over another based on the height map. If you turn off height blending, or adjust interpolation contrast all the way down, then it's closer to alpha. But in this case, since you are using procedural texturing, most likely what you want to do is lower the weight of that layer.

 

Hey, I am new to microsplat and map magic 2 so excuse my ignorance. I've watched a couple tutorials and have begun messing with each package and trying to integrate them but I am running into a very simple issue. My terrain material is waaaay too specular. Every texture is reflecting way too much light, is there any way to mitigate this? I'll include an image for reference.

https://imgur.com/a/TATJmwl


Any assistance would be appreciated.

 

Adjust your smoothness maps..

 

Ok, thank you for your answer. I gave it a try, and problem is, it is all or nothing when I try to adjust the weight of that particular texture:

 

Within the per texture properties of the microsplat shader? Or do you mean adjust the maps of each textures files individually?

 

Yes, because your noise value is -10 to +13; so you are generating a weight between -10 and +13, for a weight that maxes out at 0-1. You should re-read the docs, it talks about overdriving the noise values like this specifically.

 

The most common cause of this is people put roughness or gloss maps into the smoothness slot, or pull from the wrong channel when reading the images, and have textures close to white for them.

 

Thanks a lot, I read through the module documentation and got it to work as I needed.

 

I guess it might have been that I was using a roughness map in the smoothness slot. Are these convertable maps? Can I convert a roughness map to a smoothness by inverting it or something. Again, thanks for the quick replies, I appreciate the help a lot.

 

Yeah, there's an invert button on the texture array config you can use to do just that.

 

Thanks, I'll try that out when I get home.

 

Hey,



when I use Unity terrain in HDRP and bake lighting (lightmap, shadowmap etc. ) with Bakery, everything works fine. I applied Microsplat and now, something is messed up. Do you have an idea what could cause this?



lightmap seems to be baked correct.

I am using Gaia Pro. Marking and saving each terrain/scene as instanced helps a bit.





It turns out that terrain layers seem to be different. I can fix it by restamping the issued locations with gaia.

Unity 2019.4.18f1
Windows
HDRP 7.5.2

In my case shadowmaps did not work on Microsplat terrain whereas they did on Unity Terrain.

Best,
Andre

 

I have a repro I'm working on for some issues, not sure if they are the same or not though.. What version of HDRP/Unity/Platform?

 

Hi,
I need to use splatmaps in my project and I'd like to know if it is possible with Microsplat. The thing is, I'm not sure I have a good understanding of what a splatmap is, or if "splatmap" is the right word for what I need.
What I want to do is being able to have textures applied in different regions of the terrain, using (what I believe is called) a splatmap, e.g. an image with different zones, each zone being painted with a specific color, each color being then associated with a specific texture/material to be applied on the area covered by that color. From what I could understand, textures can also be associated with the image RGBA channels. Anyway, I searched Microsplat's documentation and could find only two references to splatmaps, one in the mesh workflow, and one in the core documentation, through the "use custom splatmaps" option. I gave it a try, bud could not find where the user can supply his custom splatmap, and in the end I'm not even sure this option matches what I'd like to do.

EDIT: Had a better look at the documentation, and I think I'm getting closer: It is done through the MicroSplatTerrain script attached to the terrain, in the "import splat maps" section. But I can't find what's wrong with my setup. See below:



Regarding Splat import/export, documentation says "it will only import splat data for channels with textures assigned". I'm going to try with an image where mapping is done through RGBA channels.

NEXT-EDIT: Ok, I think I'm close, but this is where I'm stuck. See the splamap image below:



And here is the result in Unity/Microsplat:



The R channel is associated with the texture with the 0 index, G channel with texture 1 and B channel with texture 2. But how come the splapmap is appled kind of "reverse"? And biggest issue: Why the texture 0 is applied on the whole image, but darker than the "R" spot?
What am I doing wrong?

 

Splat maps need to be normalized to 1, so that the total of the R, G, B, A channels = 1. And if your working with more than 4 textures (multiple splat maps), then all of those channels need to total 1. The splat map importer/exporter expects the data in the orientation that Unity expects, so you may have to rotate/flip your image to match the internal Unity representation.

 

I am having same problem as TipTop3D. When "Terrain Instanced" is on, the terrain disappears. This happened when I upgraded my Project to Unity 2020.2.latest. I have noted that after play has started, if I increase "Terrain Base Map Distance" on the terrain, the terrain will start to appear. By default, it seems that Microsplat sets this to 0 when scene starts.

 

Hey, i dont know how that happened, this seems to be in my scene for a while. Any idea what im doing wrong? The colors are over my whole terrain and meet at the center.
The lower part is all right how it should be, but top (green) left (yellow) and right blue are not. How to get rid of that colors ?
Thanks in advance

 

Terrain Base Map is set to 0 when tessellation is not used- when tessellation is used, it uses the basemap shader as a fallback to the main shader. Most likely you issue with instancing can be solved by simply toggling an option on the shader features forcing it to reset the state on the material.

 

I am not using tesselation. I have reset several options in the shader and updated the textures in the Microsplat Config and problem is the same. Another thing I have noted is that if I pause the Unity editor or activate my in game pause (timescale 0) then the terrain suddenly appears. Almost seems like the problem appears when game is under load. I am testing on two different scenes with medium sized terrain. This problem did not happen on other versions of Unity, the latest I used being 2020.1.16.

 

Hi, I was testing out some anti-tiling features and when I switched to Resample Fade = "Noise", I got an exception below and the terrain resampling not working properly.

Code (csharp):

1. ArgumentException: Could not find MaterialProperty: '_DistanceResampleNoiseParams', Num properties: 10
2. UnityEditor.ShaderGUI.FindProperty (System.String propertyName, UnityEditor.MaterialProperty[] properties, System.Boolean propertyIsMandatory) (at <af78ad00a40d4f61b82afc6cafb0a416>:0)
3. UnityEditor.ShaderGUI.FindProperty (System.String propertyName, UnityEditor.MaterialProperty[] properties) (at <af78ad00a40d4f61b82afc6cafb0a416>:0)
4. MicroSplatShaderGUI.FindProp (System.String name, UnityEditor.MaterialProperty[] props) (at Assets/MicroSplat/Core/Scripts/Editor/MicroSplatShaderGUI.cs:21)
5. JBooth.MicroSplat.MicroSplatDetailResample.DrawShaderGUI (MicroSplatShaderGUI shaderGUI, MicroSplatKeywords keywords, UnityEngine.Material mat, UnityEditor.MaterialEditor materialEditor, UnityEditor.MaterialProperty[] props) (at Assets/MicroSplat/AntiTile/Scripts/Editor/MicroSplatDetailResample.cs:410)
6. MicroSplatShaderGUI.OnGUI (UnityEditor.MaterialEditor materialEditor, UnityEditor.MaterialProperty[] props) (at Assets/MicroSplat/Core/Scripts/Editor/MicroSplatShaderGUI.cs:298)
7. UnityEditor.MaterialEditor.PropertiesGUI () (at <af78ad00a40d4f61b82afc6cafb0a416>:0)
8. UnityEditor.MaterialEditor.OnInspectorGUI () (at <af78ad00a40d4f61b82afc6cafb0a416>:0)
9. UnityEditor.UIElements.InspectorElement+<>c__DisplayClass58_0.<CreateIMGUIInspectorFromEditor>b__0 () (at <af78ad00a40d4f61b82afc6cafb0a416>:0)
10. UnityEngine.GUIUtility:ProcessEvent(Int32, IntPtr)
11.  

Any idea what am I doing wrong? I do also use Mesh workflow.
Thanks!

 

I just tried this, and it all seemed to work fine. An error like this can happen sometimes when the shader is not fully compiled but the GUI is trying to draw properties that aren't in the new shader file yet. The only time it would be an issue is if it throws this every time you touch the GUI..

 

How and where do i get the Triplanar module to work. I added the core microsplat to my terrain and converted to microsplat, but I can't find how to use the triplanar.

 

Nvm, I found it

 

Thanks a lot, I now understand how it is done and it works like a charm!

 

Thank you Jason for looking into it. This happens to me every time I switch to the noise overlay. I am on the latest LTS version (2019).

Regardless, the strange part is that the distance resampling then does not work (in the noise resample fade option). It looks like the terrain has always the "further" samples, and missing the close original texture. Changing noise frequency has no visual effect. How would I go about debugging this? I wanted to use noise fading since constant distance creates this "lighter circle" circle effect while zooming in the transition area.

Thanks!

 

Terrain made with World Creator standalone. Textures from Game Textures library.

Also used Enviro and Aquas. Standard pipeline.

 

Hello,

apologies if this has been asked before, but I haven't been around in a while.

I think there is an issue with the MicroSplat tessellation offset blending. When blending between multiple terrain textures with the same offset, it appears the offset at the intersection blends towards 0 instead of the average offset of the contributing textures.

For example when I have multiple grass textures on a flat surface, a tessellation offset of 0 results in a flat surface. But a tessellation offset of -0.5 on all textures results in little berms at the texture boundaries.

I'm happy to post screenshots if this explanation is too cryptic.

Matthias

 

I think I see what could be causing this- PM me, and I can send you a replacement file and we can see if it fixes the issue.

 

I have a question about the Procedural Texturing module. We would love to use this for 95% of our terrain, but in a few places, allow our artists to hand-paint some paths or clearings or whatever. And in case it matters, our plan is to ultimately Bake the procedural texture out to normal splat maps.

So the obvious approach is to use Procedural Texturing until we're ready to commit to its results, then bake it, and switch to entirely hand-painting thereafter. But this is less than ideal, because if we decide we want to tweak the procedural texturing a little bit more, we can no longer do so without losing our hand-painted areas.

Is there any way to, for example, add a hand-painted layer on top of all the procedural layers, and keep that around even as the layers underneath do their procedural thing?

EDIT: Never mind. I just found the "Non destructive workflow". Amazing! This looks like exactly what we want. Provided it all bakes out nicely — but by this point, I have no reason to doubt!

 

Terrain made with World Creator 2 Standalone. Textures from Game Textures. Unity 2019.4 lts HDRP

 

Any chance we might get Unity 2020 HDRP support any time soon? LTS is right around the corner and shouldn't be much more than a bugfix update.

 

If it's so easy, go ahead and do the port yourself. I can't start on supporting 2020.3 LTS until they release it- last time they added shadow cascades to URP 3 days before LTS shipped, I'm not going to do weeks of work only to have it require re-doing a week later.

 

Alright, did a quick and dirty fix on it.
The issue is Unity has removed the function ComputeScreenPos(float4, float) from HDRP. However, it's a pretty simple function and can still be found here:
Graphics/Functions.hlsl at 30d75d046a2d57ccf268c863476808514a4086a4 · Unity-Technologies/Graphics · GitHub

All I had to do was copy/paste it about 5 times where the function was called then regenerate the shader.

There's another issue with decal support, which I've just commented out for now.

 

Yeah, decals is pretty much a top to bottom rewrite- I fixed that computescreenpos issue a while back, you're likely downloading old versions from the package manager because it's completely broken and doesn't give you the latest versions unless you clear the cache every time- and shows you as having the latest, to make it even worse.

 

¡¡Hola!! Estoy usando Microsplat en la unidad 2019.3 HDRP no funciona ... cómo puedo solucionar esto ... gracias ... perdón por mi inglés

 

You have to install the HDRP adapter and set the material's renderloop to UnityHD.

 

Hi, would microsplat work properly with the unity "terrain tools" currently in preview?

sorry it this is a common quesiton

 

Sure..

 

Hello, I just tried microsplat on mobile with unexpected results, perhaps someone can point me in the right direction.
My goal is to get best performance out of unity terrain on mobile.

I selected my terrain, add component microsplat terrain, convert to microsplat.
my result is poor framerate.

Using No microsplat:

terrain disabled: 75fps / 90fps
terrain enabled with 1 to 4 layers with NO normal maps (65fps / 90fps)
(with no normal maps, extra texture layers seem to not impact performance much)

Normal maps on just one of the terrain textures lowers to 59fps/76fps


With microsplat: (and the 4 textures):
25fps

I figure this is due to the normal maps, so I select
"normal map mode disabled"
but still have low framerate.

what might I be missing, and for mobile is it just accepted that terrains should not use normal maps?

my test setup:
Unity Terrain with some added complex and non-complex game objects in the scene ( 60-90fps variance reflects looking at these complex areas or not)

 

"Mobile" is such a wide platform that it no longer has any meaning when talking about performance. There's an optimization guide in the docs folder, and the default texture size for MicroSplat's arrays is 1024, no idea what your using on the comparison terrain.

 

Hi @jbooth I have a series of terrain islands that use microsplat. From what I can tell, when using microsplat procedural texturing, terrains come with a CPU cost even when the terrain is off screen. If I have that correct, is there any setting or method to prevent this off screen cost? (excluding baking the procedural texturing)

Currently I'm having to manually turn off the entire terrain when out of screen bounds, though my method isn't ideal.

 

Runtime Procedural Texturing has no CPU cost per frame; the only time it does anything on the CPU is if you change some parameter and call the sync function, uploading the new data to the GPU.

 

Ah I see, I must be altering it in some way. I'll dig deeper and see whats causing it. Thanks!

 

2020.2 & hdrp10 ~

 

I came on here to ask about what I assume this guy is asking.

Any ETA on when 2020.2 will work with HDRP? I want to try out the tessellation ... I already own it, now I'm just waiting .

 

Quick question if I may...

I got your MicroSplat - Terrain Collection Released Jan 7th 2019 https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/terrain/microsplat-terrain-collection-135693#releases

I recently noticed you have come out with a more complete bundle MicroSplat - Ultimate Bundle Released Oct 19th 2020
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/terrain/microsplat-ultimate-bundle-180948#releases

Thing is as far as I can remember all other similar type " upgrades " would have an automatic discount, since you had
already bought the main asset ?

Is this just an over sight ? or meant to be that I have to re-buy the assets I already have ?
Apart from that.. Thank you very much for your continued hard work and constant upgrades to
all your modules. Thanks so much.

 

Hello, i've recently bought the MicroSplat urp support (3.61), but when i imported it, it didnt compile a script, it shows me this error:

Assets\MicroSplat\CoreLD\Scripts\Editor\UnityLDRenderLoopAdapter.cs(128,64): error CS1061: 'MicroSplatShaderGUI.MicroSplatCompiler.AuxShader' does not contain a definition for 'customEditor' and no accessible extension method 'customEditor' accepting a first argument of type 'MicroSplatShaderGUI.MicroSplatCompiler.AuxShader' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

Im currently using Unity 2020.1.17f1, with a fresh URP render asset and MicroSplat Core 3.64
also the sample scene that comes in CoreLD shows the whole terrain in pink
hope someone can help me with this.

 

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but will your Better Shaders approach help you more easily port Microsplat? Or will you keep Microsplat 'bare metal' for performance reasons?

 

I officially only support LTS versions of HDRP, which 2020.2 is not. That said, the current version works in 2020.2, just not things which have changed in the SRP like the decal implementation.