Question Raytracing support of Terrain?

Hi there, Unity 2022.2 seems to have Ray Tracing Terrain support in HDRP so I'm trying to enable the features on my levels, however, the terrain props do not cast ray-traced shadow and ray-traced ambient occlusion just same as older versions.

"Enable Ray Tracing" checkbox is enabled on the terrain component. Am I missing something to enable the feature?

The left one is placed as regular prefab, and the right one is placed as Tree prop by terrain. Obviously the right one does not cast shadow and AO. Non-raytraced shadow and SSAO perfectly works with terrain props so I assume that its only happening with raytracing.

 

Hi, thank you for giving it insight! Good to know that what's supported by Terrain RayTracing at this moment. Hopefully trees and details will be addressed by future updates.

 

Can I just voice my displeasure with the way this is being handled?
Raytracing was launched in 2020. Many couldn't use it because it lacked terrain support. It took almost three years to add terrain support, and now it's limited again because trees are still missing.

Why isn't this being pushed to completion? It's not like someone has been working on terrain support for three years, so it's a planning issue.

Certain objects not being reflected looks incredibly jarring, so we're still stuck with SSR.

 

Oh my...
This is so frustrating!

First I cheered, that unity supports ray tracing.
Then I discovered that Terrain is not reflected.

The 2022.2 comes out with "Terrain supports raytracing". I cheer again!
The I discovered that Trees are not reflected....

Could you please release something properly?

 

@sniperisa
For now the ways to has raytraced environment are:

1- Convert your terrains from using terrain trees to prefab trees. Can use a script to automate this: for each terrain tree, spawn the tree prefab at that place, then disable terrain tree rendering.
Automate is fun.
2- Manually place Reflection probes for your terrains. Set your raytracing setting for reflection to Ray missed: use Reflection Probes.
Manual is no fun. I know.

No reflection probe forest


Yes reflection probe forest

 

Preview of Final 2023.1.0b7 Release Notes:

• HDRP: Added Ray Tracing Terrain support for HDRP.

Does this mean terrain, and everything on it, like trees, details, grass etc, is now fully supported in Raytracing / Pathtracing?

 

Prefab trees will destroy your CPU. Occlusion culling in particular can't handle having that many objects.

 

Went and tested it, but no. Just the terrain still.
They added support for including instanced objects in the ray tracing acceleration structure in 2023.1, so hopefully soon.

 

Life finds a way.
There is store asset like GPUI that has feature will let you turn trees around player to prefab trees.
Terra world pro also has same functionality.
That's some of assets I know, likely there's more.
There's many reasons for people want to have prefab trees around player, now raytracing is another added reason for it.

 

Would be nice if they support HDRP but not for now.
GPUI on the other hand support all pipelines