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New Standard Terrain Shader does not support deferred mode.

Discussion in 'Unity 5 Pre-order Beta' started by kite3h, Feb 7, 2015.

  1. kite3h

    kite3h

    Joined:
    Aug 27, 2012
    Posts:
    192
    "
    // As we can't blend normals in g-buffer, this shader will not work in standard deferred path.
    // So we use exclude_path:deferred to force it to only use the forward path.
    " in shader sources.

    oops.

    How about performace of forward terrain shader in deferred mode?
    In fact, terrain is not a necessary in deferred mode.
     
    kite3h, Feb 7, 2015
    #1

  2. McDev02

    McDev02

    Joined:
    Nov 22, 2010
    Posts:
    661
    When you remove the exclude path tag it just works fine.
    I couldn't understand that as well. But it makes sense.

    The problem is when you start to have more than 4 textures. This requires another rendering pass and in deferred mode there is a problem with the blending of the normals.
    I am sure they are going to fix this. If not, you have to use up to 4 textures to use the terrain without any artefacts in deferred mode.

    The forward pass wouldn't that bad if you just use a sunlight. But when you want lots of lights in your scene and shadows of spotlights then deferred rendering is a must.
     
    Last edited: Feb 9, 2015
    McDev02, Feb 8, 2015
    #2

  3. zeroyao

    zeroyao

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Mar 28, 2013
    Posts:
    169
    Yes like EyecyArt said the format of the render target for normal vectors are not blendable thus can't be used for terrains that have more than 4 layers. If your terrain doesn't use more than 4 layers and your scene has lots of lights and shadows then you probably can modify the built-in terrain shader to include the deferred path.
     
    zeroyao, Feb 9, 2015
    #3

  4. McDev02

    McDev02

    Joined:
    Nov 22, 2010
    Posts:
    661
    So it is basically possible but the normals are compressed or in a "bad" format only?
     
    McDev02, Feb 9, 2015
    #4

  5. zeroyao

    zeroyao

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Mar 28, 2013
    Posts:
    169
    For most cases we use A2R10G10B10 format for normal render target. It is an unsigned format so we have to do "*0.5f+0.5f" conversion, and there is no common way to do blending of such encoded normals.
     
    zeroyao, Feb 10, 2015
    #5

  6. virror

    virror

    Joined:
    Feb 3, 2012
    Posts:
    2,963
    Is this something you plan on fixing or will it always be like this? Seems like a pretty big limitation.
     
    virror, Feb 10, 2015
    #6