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

I actually removed my statement on asset store page after you pointed there is some support somewhere, so i searched and posted here instead.

 

And I was in no way rude. It is my duty (as a german engineer) to point out to other people which products do not work.

If you insist, i can repost this whole "support" style in the review as well?

 

So now it's threats to tarnish my review score if I don't do what you want? You really know how to win people over. I don't need people like you in my community or using my products.

By unity's own rules I am not obligated to give anyone support. My time is not free, and I don't owe you or anyone else it. People who come with respect I will spend my time on. People who come in with disrespect and an attitude of entitlement will be shown the door.

MicroSplat is shipping in about a dozen quest games, and works fine on the quest. You can't even get your story straight - one minute MicroSplat doesn't work on the quest, the next it does, and in 6 hours between your initial review and the rewrite you somehow spent "2 weeks restructuring your entire app". Maybe you should sell time machines instead of writing software if that's how long it takes you. Or maybe in that two weeks of time you spent, if you had read the documentation, you'd have already answered your own questions. But no, let's blame someone else for our incompetence, then demand they spend their time helping you; then threaten them with bad reviews when they say no.

 

I am sincerely not sure why you blame me for some kind of "disrespect".
You attack me for being "rude" though i am not rude at all, nor was I anywhere.

OTOH, for no clear reason you insult me on and on. I am used to such behaviour only from interrnet trolls so far.

Still, i trust you to be a genuine developer from what you have written elsewhere & assume you are under a lot of stress, having read your statement about Unity versions from 2018 to 2020 being broken and changing non stop w/o compatibility.

I will give it a few more days work, as you say, although your intro docu states the stuff i did.

If you automate stuff and it breaks all over, its your style to blame the consumers lol?

OK i feel pity with you being overworked etc.

Will check in a few days more.

 

Hello Jason,
I hope you are doing well.

I bought your simple shaders and your better lit shader, and as expected, they have worked flawlessly.
With that said, I must admit that even though you have made it extremely easy to create custom shaders, my knowledge was much more limited than what I expected and I am still working on learning how to create my own.

So, I was wondering if you have any examples of billboard type shaders that you would be willing to shared with me.
Thanks

 

You can find examples of these and other effects by looking at surface shader tutorials on the web - the process of converting them to better shaders is pretty easy. I would also suggest Freya's shader tutorials, as she does a very good job of breaking down various concepts and teaching them.

 

Hey there, quick question, I have been thinking on buying the Mesh Terrains Module, but was wondering if the Digger Integration works with it, does it convert the digger caves and overhangs to meshes as well? Thanks!

 

No, but digger is already meshes- I believe there's an option to show the game objects it creates in the digger debug menu.

 

Jason, this is a new personal project Im working on in HDRP. Microsplat looks great as always.

 

Wow, looking amazing. I would love to use some of those for promo, with whatever attribution you want on them.

 

Hi Jason, when I export my MicroSplat terrain to a PC Build I'm running into a problem where the terrain textures are completely scrambled. They get scrambled differently depending on the distance from the camera, but at no point do they show the expected terrain textures. (all looks fine in Editor)



Any idea what this could be related to?

I'm using Unity 2019.4.22f1 (Standard Renderer, Deferred), Microsplat Shader Gen 3.8, with only the TerrainBlending module enabled.

 

Over the 4gb file size, library corruption, etc.

 

4gb limit... whaaaa? I did not realize that was a Unity limitation. I will look into this, thanks!

 

Hi. I just wanted to add more terrain textures and as soon as I updated the textures. It did something to the whole textures even the grass. This is how it looks now:

The grass:




There are also some (reflections?) or something with a weird shape:
It's barely noticeable in the picture but is inside the mark area:


Also this reflections now appears:




This just happened when I added a new texture and hit the update button.

I'm using Unity 2020.3.5 standard with the last updated microsplat version.

 

I just hit update again and it apparently solved it:




LOL. Typical, 2 minutes I post an issue the solution comes...

 

Has been a Unity limitation for years (check this thread). It eventually got (partially improved)/fixed in

2020.1

, so you might want to consider upgrading your project if you can as backports weren't possible.
.

 

@Mauri thanks. I upgraded to 2020.3 and it all seems to be exporting as expected. Glad Unity finally fixed this issue.

 

OK so just a newbie question to anyone willing to answer if Jason is indisposed:



Testing how Microsplat performs on a vanilla project for Oculus Quest w Unity 2021.1.11f: this is a Grab Project with a room of grabbable objects (runs at 72 FPS on its own) to which i added example included Microsplat terrain and Skybox from the free Microsplat asset.

Project settings are as proposed for the VR Oculus - color space linear, 4AA, ASTC etc.
Seems to be OK with the PC stats showing 5ms rendering for 200sh FPS.... but...

On the Oculus Quest itself, when i leave the room and walk the terrain, FPS drops to 11-15 FPS and the updates are on the verge of stuttering

I have built my own Unity project before (weeks/months before), with Mixamo walking chars and buildings architecture, terrain and plants, cars etc that runs 25-55 FPS at all times AND JUST WANTED to speed up to needed 72 FPS to avoid nausea.

Isn't the Microsplat supposed to IMPROVE the terrain rendering performance?

Thank you in advance, hoping sincerely not to irritate anyone with my newbie (low level) presence/needs/inquiry/post/statement/requirement ....

 

Hi, any idea about this error? using 2021.1.12 and URP 11. Just added "Micro Splat Mesh" component to a mesh, converted the material render loop to "URP2020" and this error pop up.

Microsplat core - 3.8.5.
Microsplat URP 2020 - 3.8.4
Microsplat Mesh Workflow - 3.8.0

Thx.

 

not sure, but I only support lts versions of the render pipelines.

 

If you take a look at the remote profiling window you should be able to identify what is causing the performance drops when on your Oculus at runtime.

 

the error listed above is one unity throws when pushing a button caused a long operation to happen- it should have no effect on anything..

 

I have experienced issues similar before, If I remember correctly they tend to happen when you try to convert existing terrains to microsplat more than once (aka, add component and convert, remove component, add component again and reconvert).

Check both the terrain settings and microsplat settings and make sure no texture scales got set to zero, re-pack the texture array, put your microsplat shader into bulk edit mode then unselect bulk edit mode (This fixes any compile errors most of the time).

 

I still have exactly the same errors after updating to latest Microsplat, Digger, and integrations. Is this supposed to be fixed?

 

mid you are not using the latest patches of unity 2020lts, earlier versions had a bug that would turn the terrain black until you went into play mode and back.

 

digger hasn’t been updated to use asmdefs, until it is you’ll have to add a reference to its asmdef files manually

 

EDIT: I think I have a good workaround for this now (I modified MicroSplat's terrain shader templates to draw an animated caustics texture onto the mesh, and that works great) - feel free to disregard

Hi Jason - I recently started using MicroSplat for my Quest 2 project, and I LOVE it. It's incredibly fast, and I love the results it gives. I ended up buying a lot of the addons and have found the whole package to be one of the best tools for Unity. Fantastic work all around.

I was wondering if you could help me with a caustics effect I'm trying to achieve. In the past, using the built-in pipeline, I used projectors to achieve this effect. I recently switched to the Universal Render Pipeline (URP), which has given me a number of benefits, but projectors are a no-go, and replacing the projector component on URP requires generating a depth texture, which has a big performance cost on mobile devices.

So I started thinking of more efficient ways to generate caustics. One idea that came to mind was using MicroSplat's emissive layers, which I think gets me closer, but is there a way to only draw the emission based on the height of the terrain? For instance, only draw the emission where y <= waterLevel? Without adding a new texture to the array (my max texture count right now is at 4, and I like the performance I'm getting from that).

Here's what I have right now. Is it possible to only draw this emission within a certain y range?


Any help would be greatly appreciated. Please let me know if I'm going about this the wrong way. Thank you!

 

Sorry if it was asked before, how to override Errosion map for procedural texturing for Microsplat Mesh workflow? I see only Cavity map override:

 

Cavity and Erosion are packed into the same texture..

 

Thank you!

 

With this settings


When Mesh Source UVs set to LightMap UV, generated shader have following errors:


Unity 2020.3.12, HDRP 10.5.1

 

Also could you please describe or point where I can find info about a format how splat weigths stored in the vertex colors in Vertex Mesh workflow? (I am making custom terrain and want to generate that weights by myself)

 

there’s no document for this- the easiest way is to look at the packing code in the painter. It packs four weights into each color component; so color.r has the first 4 texture weights, color.g the next 4, etc.

 

Hello Jason,
I am very grateful of you work with Microsplat

I have a silly question after I read all the pages of this thread :]
is there away to manipulating Per Texture Properties - Metallic parameter in runtime via script? I know I can access to the MicroSplat.mat via MicroSplatTerrain component with something like this:

Code (CSharp):

1.           microSplatTerrain.templateMaterial.SetFloat("_LavaEmissiveMult",value);
2. microSplatTerrain.Sync();

but is possible to do the same for Per Texture Properties - Metallic parameter ?


regards,

 

There's an API on the MicroSplatPropData object, which you can grab a reference to from the terrain component.

 

Having some odd lighting issues with my terrain. Any idea what might be causing these squares?

 

Awesome! found it

Code (CSharp):

1. microSplatTerrain.propData.SetValue(4,MicroSplatPropData.PerTexFloat.Metallic,value);

thank you!

 

With regard to the lighting issue I posted about above, I have discovered that it happens when there are more than 4 lights on any given area of the terrain. You can reproduce the issue in the "Terrain" scene that ships with MicroSplat by creating 5 spotlights pointing near the same area on the terrain, and as you move one of the lights around, you will see all sorts of oddities like lights appearing to go out, shifting to different locations, etc..

Would love to find a solution for this if you have one.

Edit: Tested in Unity 2020.3.13f1 and 2020.3.15f2, same issue in both

 

this is likely a unity issue- does it happen with standard terrain?

 

Indeed it does. Sorry for wasting your time, I should have tried this first!

 

Hi Jbooth,
I update microsplat to 3.8.5 from 3.5 everything goes well, but I find some performance issue.
RenderTexture size has increased as I profile the build.
After I dig into this issue. I find this "BaseMap-Hidden/TerrainEngine/Splatmap/...... /_MainTex" Somehow related to microsplat terrain material.

And I see you add a tricky code in shader
// for Unity 2020.3 bug
_MainTex("Unity Bug", 2D) = "white" {}
I dont know if this relate to the issue.

 

MucroSplat doesn’t use the basemap, but unity will still generates one anyway. It’s only remaining use is they hard coded it to use the basemap for dynamic GI. If you are not using dynamic GI then you can set the basemap size to 8 so they dont take up memory. I used to do this automatically, but don’t anymore since unity hard codes this in their lighting.

 

I See~
Unity2020 bring in a lot of trouble...
Thank you for supporting~
Have a good day

 

Hey Jason, I just picked up the tessellation add-on and I am having some trouble with it turning the terrain black. It works just fine on the example terrain that comes with MicroSplat core, but I cannot get it to work on any other terrains. I tried to create a new scene, add a terrain, convert to MicroSplat, and then add a texture through the MicroSplatConfig. I used the MicroSplat provided "Shore Sand" texture and provided normal, height, smoothness, and AO maps. After turning on Tessellation, if my view is within the tessellation range, the terrain goes black. I can adjust the range in inspector and the terrain textures will appear again when the tessellation "Max Distance" drops low enough.

On my projects actual terrain, the terrain only turns black in squares up to the "Max distance" it seems, like this:


Thoughts?

 

look for compile errors on the shader? What unity version, render pipeline, etc?

 

Unity 2020.3.13f1. Using built-in render pipeline. I do not see any errors, however there are warnings present when I enable tessellation:

All of these same warnings show up on the MicroSplat example shader when I enable tessellation on that, but that example scene works with tessellation.

EDIT: For what it is worth, I do see that the geometry is there when I fly my camera through the terrain and the clipping plane begins cutting through the ground, it is just black/unshaded.

 

those warnings are from some other shader than MicroSplat. One thing to check is toggling draw instanced on the terrain? Should work in both cases, but it’s the only thing I can think of that might affect it.

 

Thanks Jason! Checking "Draw Instanced" did the trick!

 

Another quick question. It sounds like the "Up Bias" should make the displacement move along the surface normal vs world up. This does not seem to have any effect and displacement always occurs straight up in my case. With a large amount of displacement on a near vertical surface, it should be pretty obvious that things are changing when I adjust that slider right? For example:

 

this doesn’t work in draw instance because the vertex normal is up. It could be added, but would make tessellation more expensive as it would have to sample the textured normal. Something I might add an option for.