[Official] New Terrain System

Seems pretty good. Looking at the new commit it seems that the terrain update went well beyond what was shown on the roadmap. Finally a PBR setup by default and the removal of the addpass after 4 layers. So I hope to modify this shader with ShaderGraph, add an anti-tiling system, colormaps, coverages, etc ... At least now you do not need to create Textures Arrays in a custom shader for a quality AAA.

 

Does anybody knows what is the latest status about terrain? Is it planned for 2019? And is it planned to have visibility mask for terrain for holes?

 

Hi. Beta 2013.3 has first features for new terrain system.
You can install and have fun

 

I installed the latest beta yesterday and the terrain system didn't even have a way to sculpt. Any ideas what happened to this feature?

 

It has .
There is a drop down menu, where you can select the features. And they also added a nice stamping feature

 

Oh, I see it now. Not very intuitive for someone used to the old system. Thanks for the tip.

 

I also heard some talk about some new Layer system for terrain. I don't see this feature either. Anyone know where it's at and what it is for?

 

It is only for splatmap ..try to add a texture to the terrain, and you will get it .. pretty straight forward ..

 

btw . i think would be better post question in beta area . easier to share with other beta testers . imho

 

There should be a TODO list for terrain. I cannot see anywhere. Even roadmap does not include any info about new terrain. This is really bad and not clear. I wonder new terrain system will support visibility mask...

 

Roadmap is all we have. Unity is planning a more detailed version @willgoldstone

 

@willgoldstone - sorry if i ask double, but i interesting - transparency for terrain (terrain holes) planning in new terrain system ?

 

Single most important upgrade. Terrain holes.

 

terrain holes are also a very close to the top of the priority list for our project.

 

What I say above "Visibility mask" means terrain holes. I want that feature as well

 

Whats visibility mask? In order for the terrain to have holes, Unity must change the whole system to voxel.

 

Unreal Ed 3 (don't know about 2) had terrain holes and edge rotation in 2002 or so. We will probably never get something like edge rotation until Unity start making their own internal games!

 

But Unity staff have been involved in most modern AAA games, which makes the age-old argument of "unity should make their own games" utterly pointless.

In any case - if we will have terrain holes there's a much bigger problem than just the rendering. If you use height collider, you can't have holes. That means physics bounce off it. It means particles with collision bounce off it. Triggers are far from ideal. So I guess it's not the simplest thing to solve.

Using a mesh collider here is not a great idea for performance either.

In HDRP 4 (out now) you can probably give masking and cutout a go. Will need to try it.

 

Triggers aren't ideal, that's true, but we've been getting the job done with them for quite some time.

 

I thought in one iteration a while back they stated that a static mesh collider was no performance hit. Could be wrong, it's happened before.

 

Since other engines had the feature for quite some time now, it really can't be *that* complicated to do.

 

Not with particle collisions you haven't

So these great little collisions we have like rubble, splashes etc that work in all the terrain right up to... yep, the hole of doom.

Seems so doesn't it? it's only been over a decade waiting. I guess we can wait some more. Give me lemons since I simply am not yet bitter enough.

Lemons. I demand more.

 

...which proves they need to start making games, because it hasn't made much difference. I know they also embed emplyees with developers. They will never understand the requirements until they make a game themselves, involving the entire team. After years we've just got some small terrain updates, yet there are many useful terrain-related assets made by 1 person, but Unity themselves seem unable. I genuinely don't understand why these updates haven't come sooner, along with multiple complex terrain shaders like Micro/Megasplat made available years ago.

 

Well, honestly I'd prefer Unity focus on things that solo developers cannot do well, or we cannot do without lower level access to the engine. Making the core terrain fast, the tools extensible, etc. The work they have been doing to allow them to move more of the engine into C# but still run blazingly fast is the baseline on which all of these things will be built, but a custom terrain shader is something a lot of people can develop.

 

Hey,
1) People are using trigger stuff/scripts to somehow add terrain holes? How? Sure you can temporarily disable collision between two objects but that sounds like an extremely buggy solution. :S
And yea, it won't deal with particles at all either. This trigger-solution sounds like a "wonky at best"-solution.
Or did people figure out some tricks to at least make it work in most situations?

In our game we've worked around it for now by doing this: https://i.imgur.com/E00D44l.png
But we'll probably work on a custom terrain solution soon because this fragments the terrain too much when there are many holes.

2) Not sure what you mean in that second paragraph...

 

This!
The argument is valid. @hippocoder might not see it that way. But (what feels like) the majority here do.
The terrain is severely lacking. Terrain holes are something with a ton of people require and have requested for a very long time. And yet these new terrain improvements are not actually adressing this major issue.

Performance improvements are nice and needed, but at the moment it feels like this is where it already ends.
It's simply not enough.
Even a small team like mine has some major problems with the terrain system. And our use case is not very special or complex!

They need to run into the problems themselves so they can fully understand why it is a problem and the scope of it.
It's just how things are. An "outsider" will never have the full, rich viewpoint that is required to tackle substantial issues. No offense meant, that's just how it is, it applies to all aspects of life.

 

So how do you deal with the fact that every game has different and potentially unique problems? The logical conclusion of your argument is that Unity can't supply us with satisfactory tools until they have made all possible games themselves.

I agree that the terrain is lacking. I just doubt that the reason it hasn't been addressed has anything to do with not understanding the issue.

@hippocoder's right that I haven't solved particle collisions as an issue, because for us that hasn't come up as an issue. For stuff that has come up as an issue we've just handled it one thing at a time, and haven't had to fix any related issues in quite some time. This is probably in part thanks to the fact that we have pretty explicit entrances to underground areas, so while the fix is indeed pretty "wonky" we've been able to design such that it's not really an issue.

The major area there I could use improvements right now is being able to use the stencil buffer to clip out terrain. Hand painting alpha is fiddly (could automate that), and accuracy depends on the resolution of your alpha map (no fixing that). Being able to use the stencil buffer would mean no hand painting and pixel-perfect accuracy, and possibly allow for a more performant terrain shader.

Being able to clip out collision as well would be epic. I know that the traditional answer is that you can't do this with height-based collision detection. This makes me wonder, though, if it really has to be an either/or thing for the whole of a terrain? (Not a problem I'm familiar with solving.)

 

sorry, stupid question that maybe comes out from the discussion, but I do not even see one of these beautiful feautures in my beta 3.0b4 ... is it normal?

 

Just an idea- You just have a "1 bit hole map" in addition to the height map, and when testing collision with the terrain, sample the hole map to determine if it's actually a collision.

 

2018.3 Terrain Update: Getting Started

 

Thanks - reminds me:

Locking this now as it's redundant, and pointing people to the new forum for the purpose of terrain (also you should check beta forums):

https://forum.unity.com/forums/world-building.146/