[Released] Distingo - Terrain in Detail

Perfect!

 

I'm just using the sample textures from GameTextures.com which come with Gaia. I disabled my normal character controller and camera rig and spawned the easy one button click in Gaia to spawn a basic Unity FPS character rig. This is what those textures look like with Distingo up close. This is actually a mix between the grass and sand blended with Gaia's spawning.. For Grass I had Distingo set at 1 Near UV and 3.5 Far with a 1.2 Normal Power.. and for Sand left it all at defaults because I don't really have any all sand areas in this particular scene. Defaults have Near and Far UVs at 1 as well as normal power at 1. I didn't touch any of the other settings.

 

Here is a view from the same spot looking to the distance....



The cool thing is.. I'm pretty clueless when it comes to working with textures and shaders... Between Gaia and Distingo, I feel like I can now do the stuff that I felt like I needed a Masters degree to do before! lol

 

Nice! Is that just one texture you are using the grass?

 

The terrain is using the four sample textures that come with Gaia.. Samples from GameTextures.com who provided them in exchange for cross promotion. Gaia has some blending features and I think by default it is set up for a perlin mask blend... so the brown is either the sand (0) or the grass/rock mix(2) texture which sit on either side of grass (1)..

Basically a halfway decent texture with Gaia and Distingo frosting on top... heheh

 

Hadn't seen the post above it, looks absolutely great!

 

If possible, you should make sure your stuff doesn't rely on DX10/11 to function. As Unity is multiplatform, some platforms don't support DirectX. I'm developing on the Wii U and it has its own proprietary graphics pipeline that is based on OpenGL. It even supports tessellation, but not DX style.

How does performance compare to standard Unity terrain shading? Can we expect a bit hit, is it the same, or is it better?

 

Well, if you want more power in your shaders and render, you need more power in your card, but I hear what you are saying

As to performance, I see no difference between Distingo and the Unity shaders, but I am running it on PC only.

 

I don't see a difference and my card pretty much sucks (GT610 lol)... So based on that, my guess would be no difference. heheh

 

That's good news. I'm trying to use RTP right now, but the current version doesn't work on the Wii U and I'm waiting for the Unity 5.3 for the Wii U to give it a try again. So, I am definitely excited about trying Distingo to see how it looks and performance on the Wii U. As you can imagine, it's a real technical challenge to balance quality and performance on a console like the Wii U and every bit of optimization I can find is going to help.

 

The would have thought the best you could hope to achieve with that card these days is to hold a window up You've proven me wrong!

By the way, those textures look superb. By the way, are you seeing an increase or decrease in FPS with Distingo?

@NemoKrad , any chance you are secretly working on an extra asset the stitches and cuts terrains?

 

Distingo has been in the submission process for 10 days today, so I am hoping I get told today or tomorrow that it has either passed or not. Fingers crossed

 

Stitching and cutting terrain, no, but sounds like a great idea I do have other assets in the store though, one that could be relevant to rendering a terrain scene is my Crepuscular Rays, though it's flexible enough to be more than a light shaft asset

 

Looking forward to it. I bought this excellent winter ground texture pack yesterday especially to use with Distingo, because I assume to get the best results the textures will need a heightmap, right? I normally use textures.com, but they don't come with either normals or heightmaps.

Also, in the future will it also be able to use on meshes? The reason I ask is because I have Easy Roads Pro, which is great for making the roads but there is a serious problem with the tiling on the roads. I imagine Distingo would be great to remove this tiling if it supported meshes.

 

I am currently not supporting height maps as I am not doing any displacement, but occlusion maps can be used.

 

I saw on the first page you can achieve wet and dry sand effect, can the same technique be used for ice and snow? Also, I noticed that in the textures I bought there are 5 demo scenes in which the control resolution was set to 512. Seems odd that the developer would do this, especially considering he was trying to sell the textures. What control resolution do you recommend using, of terrain sizes of between 2000 and 4000?

 

I would imagine the higher rez the better, with higher rez comes larger texture files, I guess it depends on your needs and target platform.

The smoothness can be controlled for each texture channel, as well as the metallic, if toy really want to. smoothness is based of the textures alpha value multiplied by the smoothness value you set in the Editor UI.

 

I second what @NemoKrad said about using high res. One thing to keep in mind, if you get high res, you can always make a copy that is a lower res. But you can't do the opposite if you get a res too low and need higher. I'd probably shoot for 4096 even though I would probably use 2k textures (probably lower if your platform is mobile).. Everything I currently do is desktop and not 100% sure about it, but I would assume mobile is lower... heheh

 

Gah, just realized it been in submission for 10 days, but not 10 working days It's like watching a kettle boil lol

 

Yep, mine took 14 working days - that's almost 3 weeks.

 

I was the same when my (so far one and only) asset was sat in submission-limbo. Needless to say once I see it on the store, I'm grabbing a copy lol

 

The suspense is driving us all insane. lol

 

Tell me about it lol

Just hope the bugger passes!!

 

FWIW, it looks like they had Monday off on holiday. Nothing new was added to the store.

 

This looks pretty promising. Lack of occlusion texture on terrain is something I've thought about before (with PBR the occlusion maps are really what help avoid the "if lighting is a little bright, suddenly there's no shadows anywhere" issue) so I'm glad someone is trying to solve it.

Hopefully they update the store for your asset soon.

 

Here are all of us as we wait for the asset to be released:

 

Started to add support for Mesh Terrains using the same Distingo shader calculations, the mesh version WILL be restricted to 4 terrain textures, but will have 2 versions like the Unity Terrain version, so if needed a global blend and occlusion texture can be applied.

 

Interesting... Is that 4 textures per mesh, so possible to have multiple meshes with 4 textures each? Load/Resource issues?

 

Only started it in earnest tonight, but you should be able to have n terrain mesh's each with an instance of Distingo running 4 texture channels each, not tested that, but it should be fine.

 

Looks like it manages it OK so far


(Note this is not the current, yet to be released version of Distingo)

 

That's excellent - I presume the load is no more than having the extra textures in graphics memory? (I don't know enough about graphics and how it all works).

 

Yes, so it's only like rendering any other mesh really. Naturally my shader is not going to handle rending tree's and grass on your mesh terrain, just the look of the terrain's surface.

 

Yeah me too, I'm going to purchase this when you put it on sale. Will you have an opening day 50% off sale.....hehe

 

Hehe - I helped test it. Imho his introductory price is a no-brainer for what it does!! Get in quick before it goes up

 

Well, seeing as everyone seems to think my asset is super cheap, no, lol

When I put the update out, the price will be changing, so I guess the current $10, is the initial discount price

 

So we have gaia making meshes, your shaders splat texturing meshes, speedtree with it's own lodding system; all we need now is grass and details done properly, a cutting tool to make holes in the terrain mesh, and a path/river cutter.

 

I've been testing it, and it's a steal at the introductory price. Hope to post some nice screenies soon too

 

I have a few ideas for grass Oh and rivers too

 

Well, well, well....the secret plans are being revealed! Do you mean rivers with sedimentary horizon features?

Wait is Gaia making meshes now? I must have missed that post...I had on my list of asset purchases Splat Terrain for meshed terrains. Are you saying that Distingo will do the same as Splat terrain?

 

Not sure what or how Splat Terrain works, but the idea is to be able to render, using a splat map on a mesh giving it a texture for each of the RGBA texture channels in the splat map, but, I have added existing Distingo calcs to this so, in principle, the mesh terrain should render like the Unity Terrain using Distingo, at the very least you will have the same set of parameters to control at the very least.

Yes, Gaia can export to mesh as well as the splat map and other maps too, I think it will give you an obj file, but @AdamGoodrich might be best places to tell you how it does this.

 

Things are really coming together. Not using unity terrain will be a big saving on resources. It must be a zillion years old by now.

 

Yeah, it is obj

 

Holy [EXPLETIVE DELETED]

 

For the price this looks pretty awesome. More awesome it is if it will be easier to use than RTP.
But one thing is coming to my mind:
Will you support heightmaps in any upcoming update? I mean the Heightmap POM feature of RTP makes it so beautifull. I don't want to life with terrain texture that are not using heightmaps. Stone textures etc simply look better with POM. But well perhaps you are concentrating more on the "no tiling" idea than on the stuff of RTP. Because Distingo is all about global texture options (smoothness etc) for no tiling right?

I think I will simply have to compare both and see what your tool can do.
Waiting for release. Keep it up!
Ronny

 

Distingo started out to just help remedy the tiling issue with terrain, but there are a few more options on there now, so as well as manipulating the UV's over distance you can also alter the strength of the normal map, as well as add and alter the strength of an occlusion map.

I did have displacement using height maps in there but as I wanted to keep the initial render to as few passes as possible I took it out.

The is the option to apply global blend textures as well as a global occlusion map. So this can be used to help eliminate tiling, or it could be used to render roads over your terrain or other features depending on the texture and how you want to use it. The tiling is really managed a splat (texture channel) level with the near and far UV multipliers.

I would like to add tessellation at some point too using height maps (would be SM5 only I think)

 

Wii U can do tessellation and it uses SM4.

 

OK Cool

 

Heheh... Gaia has always made meshes. It is under Utilities in Gaia Manager...

 

Cliffs integrated into the terrain engine. I really would pay for it.

 

14 days now in submission right? 2 weeks, what's taking so long