Landscape Builder - Procedural Terrains, Advanced Prefab System, spline tool, and more

Do you have the original height map?
If you only have the mesh, you have to first export the extracted heightmap.
From there, create a new terrain, and use the height map as the first layer.
You will define the size and the number of slices at terrain creation.

 

Ahh, good idea. I'll give that a try. Thanks for the tip.

[EDIT]
Yep, that works very well.

 

Which version of Unity are you using (e.g. 5.6.2p1, 2018.2.0f2 etc)? Also, are you using the standard Unity Terrain shader or something else?

 

I was going to try all the materials and write here the results, but I noticed a pattern: the problem appears at each 1/2 of applying a different material to the terrain.
Example: I can apply Standard Built In, and it will be smoothed, then I apply the LB Standard, and it will look ok, then I apply Built In Legacy Specular it will look bad and when I go and apply again the Standard Built In, it will look ok.
The problem is just appearing/disappearing each time a different shader is applied.

Or maybe not. It's not even like that. But it's definitely a problem that happens by switching the shaders applied to the terrain.

Also note that when I try to use the LB Standard, to minimize the effect of stretching (I suppose it's a triplanar shader?), it doesn't work: textures keep being stretched.
Also, it seems that on one terrain I don't have any problem at all in switching materials, it's the first terrain that I produced.
Then I copied the scene and deleted the terrain and created other terrains.

Now, little testing:
- applied smoothness to this first terrain, works perfectly with LB Standard.
- loaded other scene, switched from Built In Standard to LB Standard, applied terrain settings: nothing happened, apart the fact that the field where I dragged the terrain to work with was cleared. Doh.
- dragged the terrain again on the field. Reapplied LB Standard. No way.
- re-texturing landscape: no effect.
- switched to Legacy Specular: the problem disappeared.
- switched back to LB Standard: the smoothness reappeared.
- switched to Built In Standard: problem persists.
- switched to Built In Legacy Diffuse: the problem is gone.
- switched to LB Standard: the problem reappears.
- switched to Legacy Specular: problem gone.
I don't know, I could swear that at one point in the past the LB Standard worked well.
- switched to LB Standard: problem reappears.
- loading another scene: terrain material type is Built In Standard and the problem is there.
- switched to LB, applied changes: the problem is still there and again the field where I drag the terrain to edit is cleared out!
- drag again the terrain to edit and click Apply Terrain Settings: problem persists, but this time Landscape To Edit isn't cleared.
- switched to Legacy Specular and changed the specularity settings: the settings don't seem to have any effect, and I also have 0.092 on both metal and specular in the main texture settings.
- raised smoothness in the first texture to 0.7 and retexture the terrain: nothing happens.
- reloaded the first scene, terrain looks good.
- dragged the terrain in the Landscape To Edit field. It says LB Standard.
- switched to Built In Standard: the smoothness didn't change, but again the Landscape To Edit field is cleared up!
- I drag again the terrain in the field and the material now says Built In Standard. I don't change it, I just click Apply Terrain Settings: the smoothness problem doesn't appear and the field is not cleared.
- switching to LB Standard: the smoothness problem doesn't appear.

OK I'll stop here for now and give up with the materials choice, hope you have enough hints to solve this.
One last little note: I tried to set Megasplat as material and I don't have it, so this may also have created some faulty hidden settings?

Btw: I see LB supports Megasplat, does it also support Microsplat? I can't buy Megasplat at the moment, and Microsplat would be perfect (I don't even need 256 materials on my terrain... but I will probably buy a couple of modules later on).

Btw 2: I can't see a Physics Material field in the LB settings. Maybe this could be added, at the moment I select manually all the terrains and add the PM myself.

 

I actually found the Image Modifier by myself early morning my time, and imported a .png file and got that to work. It was pre-filtered so it has terraces but I figure that I can use LB to erode/smooth it some.

I can use a mask to keep my river portion from being smoothed/eroded, can't I?

I'm going to try your instructions and see if I can get the raw file to work, and yes it is one large file.

 

Yes, PNG files use 8-bit blending per colour channel so you will need to use some smoothing. RAW and TIFF grayscale uses 16-bit blending which is much better. Also you can use GeoTIFF files which can be 16bit or 32 bit. Perlin Layers use 16bit blending too.

Using a Stencil Layer to filter the final pass smoothing or erosion is on our roadmap.

 

Which version of Unity are you testing on? (e.g. 5.6.2p2, 2018.2.0f2 etc)

MicroSplat integration is currently in beta testing. See post here.

Diffuse and Specular terrain materials are considered legacy and are only for backward compatibility with old Unity 4 projects that have been upgraded.

Yes, it is possible that if you have continually switch terrain materials back and forth, you may have run into an issue.

Also, make sure you create unique names for Landscapes within your project as some Material Types require this. We mention this in the manual. We'll also add an extra note on the tooltip of Landscape Name which will be included in the next version.

 

That's good to know, I need to smooth most of the terrain, but not where the river is.


Or maybe I could fix the river after smoothing, I'm just getting started with LB. And I see that Aquas can be used too, but that's for a later date.

 

I am on 2018.1.6f1.

Forgot to mention: the first terrain is 25 chunks, for 20000 units size, but the others are... 100 chunks, for 40000 size. Maybe this can have an effect???

Another hint on the smoothness problem: only the first texture is affected.
Other hint: I am actually using only 2 textures on these terrains, but the one that works has 3. I'm going now to try to add a 3rd texture to the other terrains.

Btw: is Megasplat "battle tested"?

 

Thank you. That works very well.

 

Update: the problem with smoothness happens at the crossing between the first and the second texture, it's not on the first texture, nor the second.
Then, the second texture and the third work right: I tried to raise their smoothness and put it back down, and they work correctly.

 

Ok, what are the steps and settings you used to repro the images above?

 

Hi,

I'm trying to import a group of 2048x2048 .raw heightmaps to be used on my landscape. However, after selecting the folder, I get this warning logged to the console and then nothing happens:

WARNING: LBTerrainData.ImportHeightmapRAW - The RAW data file resolution (2896.309) does not match the terrain heightmap resolution (2049) Landscape 01.LandscapeTerrain0000 file:

Any ideas on why LB2 sees the resolution how it does? Of note, I can manually import any of the files to the generated terrains and it takes it just fine with a resolution of 2049.

 

How big are the raw files? Are they small enough to email or msg us so we can test them?

 

Sent a PM with a link to a few of the images

 

Think I figured it out.

Converting the image type from RGB to Greyscale and then re-exporting as a RAW seems to be working now. I still have a large number of images to finish up, but a quick test with just one image had it parse fine and error when trying to find an image for the next terrain.

Oh, and it also didn't help my images were 2048 and not 2049.

 

Yes, RAW files need to be a gradient / grayscale of values between 0-65535 (0.0-1.0). Sorry for any confusion.

 

We're adding Stencil Layer filters to the Topography Final Pass Smoothing. You need 2.0.6 Beta 4s+ or wait until the next release.


We support AND plus NOT filters for Smoothing. We hope to add Stencil Layer filters for Thermal Erosion soon.

 

Er... I really don't know. I use the tool normally I guess, even though I'm an advanced user so I'm messing around quite much. In general I keep changing textures, resolutions, alpha and such, I'm still testing what I can do and what's the best pipeline.
In at least one case I recall that after changing the max resolution of one texture in Unity, the smoothness problem appeared. That sounds crazy, but it's really how it went: I had the viewport aimed exactly at a third texture in a scene, changed the import setting of one texture, only the max size, and after Unity did it, FLASH!, the smoothness problem was there.

 

Hmm. I wonder if it is related to the texture sampling method/algorithm used by Unity. We have seen some odd results when changing the sampling method in our GPU Texturing shader.

 

I've gotten a lot accomplished in my 2 weeks with LB. I have Mapmagic too, and it is a very good asset, but it's not set up to work as easy as LB. I really like the texturing and placing grass by height.

One small problem that I'm having is that on the highest part of my map, there is no texture, just a white area. I have that texture set to the highest height but for some reason it's not showing up. I'm not using any stencils or anything like that and haven't been able to figure out what's happening.


Here it is in first person:


I've looked through all of the post in this thread, and the manual, but I might have missed something.
Any thoughts on what I can do?

 

Can you share your Texturing tab setup for the Texture that is having the issue?

Also which build (version) of LB do you have (the version is on the Landscape tab).

 

I'm using 2.0.5


I didn't change any of the settings except the height.

 

As a test, what happens if you turn off "Use Noise"?

 

Can't try it yet, downloading HQ Photographic Textures Grass Pack Vol.1, much bigger than I thought.

 

Turning off "Use Noise" didn't work, so I tried using "Minimal Blending" and the white spot is gone.

 

Ok. Do you have at least one Texture that is "Constant Influence"? You'd typically set the texture you want as the "default" texture to "Constant Influence" and then set the strength to say 0.01 so that other Textures can override it.

There is some discussion about this in one of our old Texturing Tutorials found here. It is a bit outdated, but still contains some useful techniques.

Other video tutorials are listed on page 10 of the manual (Landscape tab, click Help) under the section "Video Tutorials and Demos".

 

I've watched most of the videos, but need to watch them again now that I've been using LB a lot more.

 

When testing we'd rarely use topography that reaches up to the maximum height of the landscape and we'd always have at least 1 Texture that has Constant Influence. However, if you are using imported heightmaps that have been normalised, then I guess it is possible on a fairly flat landscape that there is something going on with blending at height = max. If this presents an issue and minimal blend isn't what you're after for this Texture, then we'd be happy to grab an Exported Template from you and test your scenario.

 

We're adding Stencil Layer filters to the Topography Final Pass Thermal Erosion. You need 2.0.6 Beta 4t+ or wait until the next release.



Like Final Pass Smoothing, we also support AND or NOT filters.

 

Unity 2018.3
We've added support for 2018.3. You can see details in the beta forum here.

 

My landscape is fairly flat, but the Minimal Blend seems to be working fine. Must have missed that Constant Influence thing, Unity makes the first texture that you use do the same thing.

 

Maybe when a Texture is added with "Add Texture" button, the Texturing Mode should be "Constant Influence". I don't think it will affect anything else if we change this default.

 

I'm having some warnings when I try to enable Aquas underwater effects through LB. It's looking for the shaders in Standard Assets, but you have to use the Postprocessing shaders now, so the shaders aren't working at all. I'm having a hard time figuring out how to change the scripts. If it's already been answered please point me in the right direction.

System.Type bloomType = GetClassTypeFromFullName("UnityStandardAssets.ImageEffects.Bloom, Assembly-CSharp-firstpass, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null", false);

Do I need to change it to something like:

 System.Type bloomType = GetClassTypeFromFullName("UnityPostProcessing.Resources.Shaders.Bloom, Assembly-CSharp-firstpass, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null", false);

Or something similar?

The script is LBIntegration.cs, but you already knew that.

 

Which version of LB and AQUAS?

 

Ok, I'm assuming AQUAS 1.5.3, so am working on a fix for that. Should have a solution soon. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Which version of Post Processing Stack are you using?

 

I'm using the latest PP from Unity. Also the latest Aquas and LB(not the beta). When I added the Standard Assets, it caused my water to lose it's prefab status, and also LB disappeared from Unity and I had to reimport. Had I known that Standard Assets would wonk out my project and not have the shaders, I wouldn't have bothered with it.

 

Is this pp 2.0.14 from Unity package manger or the v1.x from the Asset Store?

LB disappeared from Unity?? So AQUAS is 1.5.3 (latest from Asset Store)?

v1.5.3 of AQUAS "seems" to include a version of Post Processing in the download package. Not sure if you're using this or something different. I have a prototype working but I'd like to be sure I've tested it before uploading the beta.

 

I'm using the latest PP version from the Asset store. LB didn't totally "disappear", all of the assets were still there in the Project folder, but the editor was missing for some strange reason, and I couldn't bring it up through Window.

I saw that Aquas has it's own shaders, but the LB script still refers to the Standard Assets shaders. Maybe I should implement Aquas outside of LB and see what happens. No time today, we're preparing for a hurricane.

 

AQUAS 1.5.3 Support

We've issued a patch for LB with AQUAS 1.5.3 for Underwater FX with Post Processing Stack v1.x (PP from the Asset Store). LB v2.0.6 Beta 6a or newer is required.

 

Stay safe. We've issued a patch. See above.

 

U2018.3 Terrain Draw Instanced Support


As Unity continue to update the terrain system in 2018.3, we're taking advantage of those changes.

 

HI,
I have an idea (maybe stupid)
For my openworld i need some nav mesh zones on my terrain. I suppose i could try with the path system to draw a mesh on the terrain without carving it ??

I was thinking maybe there could be an easy feature for you to insert (maybe not) : would be to use the "stamping preview" for manual terrain shaping in LB as a scanner (with a circle mask or without) to select a specific zone on the terrain and then export it as a mesh??? Obviously, after that we could put the mesh on the terrain not render it and bake it's navmesh....
What do you think? You can call it NavMeshZoneBuilder ...

What is the most clever to your opinion? Path system is enough?
Thanks in advance

 

Do you have a mock-up image of what you're trying to achieve?

 

sorry what is mock up?
edit: i see..No i don't but i can draw something explicit to show you what i have on mind cause it could be a great workflow and fast compared with exporting the whole terrain in blender and cut it!!

 

An example picture or screen shot of what you'd like it to look like. I'm assuming that you don't need a mesh, just an area for the navmesh.

 

no actually i would need to convert a part of the terrain (only a part) into a mesh to navigate. I got to go now but i will draw something tonight and revert asap. Thanks for taking this in consideration

 

I am finally going to be getting back to working with this asset in around 2-3 weeks (Yay!). I had a general question whether there is a real benefit to upgrading my Unity from 2017 to 2018. If there are tangible benefits such as faster terrain, improved performance overall, better lighting, etc. it might be worth it. I am just not sure I want to risk breaking anything in the process.

 

As tool developers, for us the big improvements are coming in 2018.3 with the new terrain system. We've seen some good terrain generation performance improvements with Landscape Builder. LB 2.0.6 has a lot of new features and we've not had a chance to test U2018.3 (beta) under in-game conditions yet.

With Unity such a moving target regarding versions and feature changes, it is difficult to know when to upgrade. With LB 2.0.6 we'll support U5.6 -> U2018.3 (beta 5), so no matter what you decide, you should be covered.

 

so, i don't know if it will help but let's say i have a desert on 4 tiled terrains but baking such a big navmesh is not possible


and i want enemies to be driven by navmesh in the green zone:




Could it be possible to scan that zone with a "terrain modifier" and export this green zone to a mesh?
So navmesh could be made real quick with the possibility to export parts of a terrain and not the whole terrain...

Hope i'm clear