How to automatically do an initial painting of terrain based on altitude & slope?

I'm working on a project where the terrains are HUGE, and painting every square meter by hand is going to take too long and cost too much. In principle, 90% of the terrain texture could be assigned automatically based on altitude and slope. We're only hand-painting (instead using a triplanar or otherwise procedural shader) because there are key bits like paths, town squares, etc. that need to be hand-painted.

So, I'd like to have a tool that does a first pass at painting the terrain automatically, and then we let the artists touch it up by hand.

Some searching led me to this blog post, which doesn't look too bad. But it's from 2013, and I know Unity has changed the terrain system a few times since then. (We're using 2018 on this project.)

Are there any off-the-shelf tools that support this sort of automatic terrain painting? We're willing to spend a little money on it to make our jobs easier. If not, is the approach in that blog post still valid?

Thanks,
- Joe

 

To follow up my own post: I've learned that MicroSplat has a Procedural Texturing module which can do this on the fly (with a really cool control interface, too!), and it has a "Bake" feature that will then write out its data as standard splat maps. We haven't tried it yet, but it sounds like just what we were looking for.

 

Yes, that would have been my first suggestion. Besides Microsplat, Gaia and Map Magic can do automated terrain texturing upon predefined rules (slopes, height, etc) for sure.