Is there a splatmap painting tool similar to Unity Terrain?

In our game the only thing we're interested in using the Unity terrain for is quick sculpting of base terrain and painting of the splatmap. We want to use different shaders for the grass, bushes, trees, and other decals and props.

However after some light testing it's very obvious that Unity's terrain, even without any trees or details, is VERY unoptimized. I'm getting over a hundred drawcalls just from the terrain itself with dynamic shadows on, when it should only be 1 drawcall. Unity terrain's drawcalls increase the more hilly the scene is. I'm not even sure how those high draw calls are even possible.

What we'd like to do is use a custom made mesh in Maya LT, and then use a simple splatmap shader that is similar to Unity's terrain to get nice splatmapping results for only 1 drawcall on the terrain.

So a couple questions:

• Is there a tool to achieve the nice workflow of Unity's splatmap painting on a custom mesh (in or out of Unity)?
• Is there a basic and simple splatmapping shader available, like Unity's terrain shader, that can be applied to a custom mesh (and supports dynamic shadows)?
• Is splatmapping the best solution we're looking for or is there other ways to create optimized terrains with nice results?

I saw T4M which seems to address these issues, but it appears to have more features than we're looking for in a solution (it deals with trees, grass, and other things similar to Unity Terrain).

 

While it doesn't output splatmaps, Substance Painter could be used in a splatmap style workflow. i.e. each of your base terrain textures could be set up in separate layers, then your "splatting" could be done in the layer masks. Once you're happy with the terrain, you would bake a single flattened texture to Unity.

 

Thanks, Kirk! Substance Painter looks pretty neat. Would you still get the crisp high resolution results on larger terrains that you would from tiled splatmapping?

 

Hm. Didn't think of that. Probably not if you're talking very large terrain maps. The biggest texture Painter can export is 4k x 4k. If you need bigger than that, you might try some kind of terrain stitching, but now you're trying to work around tool limitations, so you might be better served finding a dedicated tool.

 

I like using shaders that blend textures according to the vertex colors.