[Released] Distingo - Terrain in Detail

Works like a charm now, thanks!

 

Ahh! That's brilliant news

Sorry you had the issue in the first place, glad we sorted it

 

I once loved RTP. A lot of neat stuff in it. But I am in love with Distingo for its simplicity and effectiveness. Not as powerful as RTP but damn close enough for me. Thanks for this asset. =)

 

That is great news, so glad you like Distingo

 

Hey,

First of all, this is awesome, Great Work!!.

But in my case I have a problem, I have a world with a Huge Terrain Generated based on Tile Terrains, So I cant implement by default your solution.

So I made some changes to make it work.

In my case I have "Biomes" and each one of them can has different splats with different textures, with one or more terrains objects associated to it, So I created a script to implement the basic functionality (no global bend) and it can be attached to each terrain individually or attached to a "Biome" Gameobject to allow share the material with the associated Tile Terrains.

Can you implement something similar or at least to achieve the same functionality?

I attach my actual scripts (they are working ofc, but only to fit my needs).

Thanks in Advance.

PD = My "World" Terrain is generated procedurally so I need to fill all the values via script always.

 

OK cool, sounds like a scripting solution you are after, I could look at doing this as a Distingo add-on once the update 1.2 goes live.

 

Some progress on VTP Integration. Currently working on the Heighbased Blending. As you can see, the sand texture gets properly blended around the stones. Sorry for the non-artist style. Artist is busy at the moment, but we wanted to show some progress nevertheless.

Any critics, comments & suggestions are highly appreciated.

And big thanks to @NemoKrad for the collaboration on this one

 

That is just awesome Great work!

Can't wait to integrate this into the base Distingo Asset, so if people have VTP, they can use it like this in conjunction with Distingo

Gaia + Distingo + VTP = Something pretty special I think ;D

 

Does that support Probuilder objects?

 

As far as I know ProBuilder uses simple meshes. So basically , since VTP works on every mesh it should. Though not tested yet. Will confirm that asap.

 

Well the reason I ask is I use another Vertex Painter (Ikari) and it had some issues. It would slow to a crawl because of something in how PB scripts worked. They did resolve it though and it was on the Ikari side. So you might run into something. It could just be you would notice what the other guy did not. But I am way more interested in the shaders you have. I already have Probuilder Vertex Painting, Polybrush Vertex Painting and Ikari Vertex painting haha. The first two just come with the tool themselves.

 

Our shaders just work with Vertex Color Information (apart from the flow stuff, that's is utilizing UV4s, Lightmap UVs are not beeing touched of course ). So if you have a vertex painted mesh, our shaders work out of the box.

 

Yes, that was an assumption I had. I mean if I can't use your vert tool with PB I can just use theirs or one of the 2 other ones I have hahaha. I did wishlist your item if that gives you a warm fuzzy feeling hehehehe

 

Interesting stuff guys

 

Yeah very nice, had hoped height-based blending would be incorporated into Distingo. There is this asset which does it as well, considering its price I assumed it wasn't that tricky to do.

 

If you impliment a nice way to do flowmaps I will then be 100% sold. That is such a difficult thing to do usually (flow maps). But being able to do it right in editor would be really nice.

 

I believe Gaia can produce flow maps, but I guess you would like to paint your own at design time with VTP maybe?

 

I need some clarification on why VTP +Gaia + Distingo. I've read the asset page and can't work out what the advantage is over a traditional unity terrain? Are there greater performance benefits, or is it better blending of textures?

 

That's correct. FULL CONTROL! It does have a flow mask exporter, but I rather be able to just put my own water mesh in (by what ever means, spline loft, or standard mesh, etc) and pain't my flow on the way I want it. Too much automation is some times not what I want hehe.

Edit: The devil is in the details. And some details Gaia just may not handle well enough for me. I have to try the flow map exporter it has though.

 

Distingo, It's primary purpose was to reduce tiling artefacts on Unity terrains, but has grown a little giving you more control over how your terrain textures are rendered.

Gaia, well it's Gaia, it's an awesome tool for creating you terrain scene's

VTP, gives another level of texture modification to both the terrain shaders in Distingo and other mesh's you have in your scene.

 

Is coming to VTP in one of the next updates. At least for meshes. For terrain it is yet to be discussed.

 

I think @PitHeimes is doing a bit more than just the height blend.

 

Meshes be what I am looking for. =)

 

I am also a person who has both. I see them as two different tools to be used at different times. It depends on what the particular project I am working on needs.

 

Ah this explains it I was having weird issues with tiled terrains.

EDIT: Just tried your scripts they work perfectly for tiled terrains thanks !

 

Again some more progress on the VTP integration to show off. Again, sorry for the non-artist approach. He is still busy with Unitys great Art challenge. Be sure to check them out. They are all fantastic!

First of, full PBR is running now. Sampler Count did not increase.


Parallax running too. Shots were made with just 7 samples.



And last but not least, Heightbased Blending. From top to bottom: Painted with a huge height of sand, with a lower height of the sand and for comparison with disabled Height based Blending:

 

Very nice!

Does the heightbased blending work in conjunction with the POM too?

 

Yes, of course

 

Curious what the process is on setting these up in conjunction with Distingo and versus stand alone on a mesh material

 

No differences at all. Exact same Maps are used. Just select the shader from Distingo and paint your terrain, as you would normally do it with distingo. And for meshes, Just create a material with our VTP shader and start painting the meshes with our tools

 

Very very true. RTP just has a whole lot going on. It is VERY powerful, but also has some pretty deep complexity in setting it up. I found I needed to constantly tweak it. Over and over. Once you got it set though it was nice.

For me, outside of the POM on terrain, Distingo does a few of the things that RTP does that I liked the most. Not including POM, pom I will miss on terrain. But maybe VTP is going to save the day with that.

 

Or paint with my other Vert Tools yea? hehe.

It seems like you are making it sound easier than it really is with the terrain. Distingo is a terrain shader. So I am curious how exactly vtp's stuff inegrates into it. There is no setup involved? Are you guys working together to just make them work together if both are in the project? Because I know you can't define a material/shader for a single texture in standard unity terrain. Or I am just totally clueless on how the terrain shader works in Unity.

Unreal 4 it's more obvious because you can create your shader yourself pretty easily (with comparison to shaderforge style editing which I know sf spawned from the desire to have shader editing like unreal materials)

 

Yes, there is no real setup involved. Just add Distingos script to your terrain and setup the textures. And paint of course with the built in Terrain system.
This of course only works if both, VTP and Distingo are present in the package. Distingo will come with a shader which utilize a .cginc file from VTP which does the heightbased Blending and Parallax stuff.

Please not that there are still a lot of settings missing, like depth bias for parallax and so on. But basically that's it.

 

Nice. See now if I want that POM back and height blending I can get this and its still more simple than RTP haha.

 

And if it gets a little more complex when we first thought, we will surely make some video tutorial for you

 

Is your documentation available online? I am curious what you are doing with the combined texture. Or you can just describe real quick. It's obvioslt height map and some other stuff.

 

You can Check the VTP Thread.

 

Sweet. Thanks. (Im sitting on your page on asset store, getting close to click the buy button haha). Just want to evaluate that documentation. =)

 

Awesome! will be great seeing how the two packages evolve.. Love to see you guys working together, @PitHeimes and @NemoKrad! Great stuff!

 

Here is latest test screenshot from new stamps pack I'm working on for Gaia. The textures and environment are from Manufactura K4's Middle-East environment pack. When I first spawned everything the Gaia, the ground textures were tiled pretty bad. Granted, I probably could have spent time sitting and resizing the different textures and made it look ok, but instead I just added Distingo to my terrain through Gaia's GX button on Gaia Manager and it instantly made the terrain look better! Great job @NemoKrad!

 

I got it despite the SM4 prerequisite. It's just so good!

Also, I saw that in the meantime you worked on a SM3 version for mobile - which I may be going to use for an old project of mine.

Now, I've got a few Unity 4.x (4.7 if I remember correctly) projects which would greatly improve with Distingo.

Is there any way I can downgrade the package to use it? Maybe just importing the files with the shaders? Upgrading the projects at this point of development could be a veeery dangerous task, I should be upgrading quite a lot of other assets and I'm not sure the end result would be as I expect with all those changes.

 

I am actually having issues with the SM3 version and will be taking it out of the next update I am afraid.

Distingo at the moment is based off the 5.1 shaders, and uses the PBR lighting model, so I don't think, as it stands you could roll it back to 4.x

If I get time, I could look at a 4.x version, but, as ever, I am time poor at the moment

 

small request - can you guys not hardcode paths? I like to put my assets into the plugins folder. Just a heads up in case distingo needs to look for vtp.

Most of my assets have relative paths so they're ok being organised.

 

The intention is to have a separate package in Distingo that you only unpack IF you have VTP. I think @PitHeimes will be doing something similar his end.

 

No hardcoded Paths will be used. After the import you can drag around the shader folders as you like

 

Getting this error and unsure on what to do - shaders, shiver


Platform defines: UNITY_ENABLE_REFLECTION_BUFFERS UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF1 UNITY_SPECCUBE_BOX_PROJECTION UNITY_SPECCUBE_BLENDING UNITY_TEXTURE_ALPHASPLIT_ALLOWEDCompiling Fragment program with DIRECTIONAL SHADOWS_SCREEN LIGHTMAP_OFF DIRLIGHTMAP_COMBINED DYNAMICLIGHTMAP_ON _TERRAIN_NORMAL_MAPShader error in 'Nature/Terrain/Distingo Standard': maximum ps_4_0 sampler register index (16) exceeded at Assets/Distingo/Shaders/Occlusion/DistingoTerrainSplatmapCommon.cginc(41) (on d3d11)

 

Hi @tapticc,

This issue can occur if you have Lightmap statis on with your terrain, can you check on the terrain you have switched the Lightmap static off, as described in the docs, and I think in the UI tools tips to?

 

Thanks for the tip will check after work tonight

 

Let me know how you get on

 

Some further progress on the VTP Integration. This time - still no artist - at least on some terrain.

Heightbased Blending tunred off:


Heightbased Blending turned on: