[Released] MegaSplat, a 256 texture splat mapping system..

Hi

we've just started using MegaSplat on our project. I would like to set the "renderQueue" parameter of the MegaSplat terrain material. The material's shader has a custom editor and I do not see the parameter in the material's inspector as I do for our other custom shaders. Is there a way to set it without script or alteration of the generated shader?

Thanks in advance for any reply!

 

Not right now, though it's very easy to set via script. I can look into exposing these in a future patch though, as I need to do it for one of my other projects anyway..

 

Thanks!

 

Hey, i want to generate geometry and splat data within a computeshader and then have megasplat read directly from the buffer that it outputs so that there is no bottleneck between cpu and gpu. What would need to be done in the megasplat shader to work with this? Is it even possible?

 

As long as the geometry is generated with the required data it should work fine - vertex shaders don't really care how the data got there, just that it's there..

 

since the update Ive been getting this error

Code (CSharp):

1. Shader error in 'MegaSplat/Terrain': invalid subscript '_ShadowCoord' at line 5556 (on d3d11)

 

Is it showing any visible errors? Pink shaders? If not, can you possibly me a repro (stripped of assets if you need, the issue most likely has to do with your lights/settings causing a shader variant to compile that my testing scene does not).

 

Hi again Jason,
I finally got a good test scene together so you can see the last couple of issues I've been experiencing. The entire project is about 75M. Do you have an FTP server? I'd love to get you the project so you can see if the changes are doable without too much effort on your part as they'd be a life-saver for me!
I just sent you an email from my hotmail account--hoping i got your gmail account correct.
Thanks again Jason for all your help. I'm going to try your suggestion about getting and modifying the splatmap images manually and let you know how that goes. Take care and talk to you soon. - tony

 

Hello,

Just recently purchased megasplat, and I am having problems converting my terrain composer 2 terrain paint job to megasplat. I've been following a tutorial you made on youtube, but don't seem to be getting the right result.

I have the desired splat map working in TC2, and when I go through the process outlined in your video the generated splat map (splat_control) seems to have the desired information written to it, but the result doesn't actually update on the terrain..it seems to just fill the terrain with one of the channels in the texture array. Is there some part of the process I am just overlooking here?

I've included a series of images to illustrate the process im going through.

Thanks for any reply!

 

That all looks fine- and it looks like the data is there, as the blue channel is the blend weight between the two layers. If you open the control texture in photoshop, does the R or G channel contain non-0 values?

One other idea is to paint something on the terrain before the conversion with MegaSplat. You shouldn't have to do this, but I had a bug like this with Meshes a while back and am wondering if it possibly exists on terrains too?

 

Hey @jbooth -- I saw on a review of 'Vegetation Studio' you mentioning the MegaSplat integration. Can you provide any more details on that, do we have to do anything specific?

 

Vegetation Studio has support for reading MegaSplat's control texture format, so you can use it's procedural rules to populate vegetation based on MegaSplat's texturing.

 

Perfect.. thanks man!

 

It looks like the red and green channels are both black, and all the info is just in the blue channel. I also tried to paint something before doing the conversion, still no result on the terrain (it gets filled in with a single channel). I've attached the control texture, if it helps any.

Also, I realize I didnt mention, but I'm using 2017.3.0b10, do you think this issue is related to the version of unity I'm using?

Thanks again!

 

I generally don't test or look into bugs on Beta versions of unity, as they are often unstable and then I just waste a bunch of time chasing issues that get fixed before release anyway. Can you check to see if this happens on a non-beta version of Unity? Do the example scenes look fine?

 

@jbooth Ok I just tested this with a default unity terrain, and it does actually seem to be working in this unity version. So the issue must be occurring specifically from the splat map generated by terrain composer 2... I will look further in that avenue.

Are you by any chance aware of any splat map output TC2 conversion issues? I feel like I read somewhere that megasplat should be compatible with TC2.

 

Greetings @jbooth - for the longest time I have been trying to sort out why Normal data doesn't look right when using TriPlanar Procedural shader. When working yesterday on my terrain, nothing I did would make the snow show up, just the smoothness. I switched the shader to UV Project Axis with Project Tangents enabled and BOOM, snow works AND my normal maps looks great! Wow! I then switched back to TriPlanar and sad face..... Normal data and snow look incorrect. There is a way to project tangents with the TerrainEngine we use BUT its bugged and crashes the terrain, hard to say when we will get a fix. However, I did see that what little terrain I got before it bugs out does display correctly with Tangents enabled and using the TriPlanar mapping type on Procedural Shader. Is there any chance of getting the Project Tangents option added to the TriPlanar mapping method for Procedural Shader as well?I would stick with the UV Project Axis method but it of course doesn't work at all angles whereas the TriPlanar does. I will also look through the shader today to see if I can add it meself, however, whenever I update the shader I would have to re-add it so thought I would ask you as well.

 

Hi, I have Megasplat. Does your microsplat tesselation asset add features missing in Megasplat?

 

There are other users in the thread who use TC2 for splat map generation - I don't own TC2 myself, and the author never got back to me about doing a direct integration, so I don't know from experience.

What missing features?

Not sure if I totally follow what the issue is, is it that the tangent basis is incorrect on some axis?

 

@jbooth Im honestly not entirely sure. In TriPlanar mode, on my procedural mesh, normals just... it looks like they aren't there. This has been an ongoing issue for months but I couldn't put my finger on it. Relief Terrain works just fine, no issue there but I didn't want to just say it was a flaw in your shader. Moved on to another project that uses Relief Terrain and didn't think about it again until it was time to replace Relief Terrain with MegaSplat. It was instantly obvious, no normal data. Then, on top of that, snow doesn't work in TriPlanar mode either - just no snow, take a look for yourself. However, if you generate the Tangents, boom it works. I see this because I can enable Project Tangents on the Uv Project Axis mode and everything looks right again, except of course that I need triplanar mapping. Terrain Engine has the ability to generate tangents, however, its broke and the developer is busy on another project. So I want to add the project tangents to the TriPlanar mode as well so we can use Snow and see the normal data with this shader on our terrain. Looking through the code though, it was easy to add to the editor - not so much the shader so far. I admit Im not the best at this so, I'm asking for help. Please.

 

Ok I also got a 2 screen shots.

Number 1 is TriPlanar mode. As you see, its like theres little to no normal beyond the detail map and no snow.



And 2, here is the UV Project Axis mode with PRoject Tangents enabled. This is the way TriPlanar mode looks if I enable Tangents on the Terrain Engine but the function is broken and causes holes so thought it would be quicker to duplicate it from the UV Project Axis mode add it to the TriPlanar mode in the shader. Also, snow works here in this mode as you see. It may also be an issue for other users who have procedural meshes so hopefully a shader edit for TriPlanar makes sense.

 

Lol, sorry, Megasplat is not suffering from a lack of features. No, just wondered if the little one did anything unique?

 

I actually wasn't aware that I could export the splat map directly from TC2, but that unfortunately nets the same result in the end.

On the other hand, not sure how this passed my notice, but the last conversion test did have some interesting results (image 1)... it seems, though the control texture has been written to accurately, there is just a small line on the edges of the terrain that actually shows the other texture.

I also tried the process in 5.6.3p4 (image 2); though I am getting something other than a filled in terrain here, it still isnt showing exactly what I would expect...

*edit: that second image is in a fresh new project as well

 

So if you paint some stuff onto a regular unity terrain and convert it, it all works right?

Either way, if you can pack up a repro scene I can take a look.

 

MicroSplat or MegaSplat? MicroSplat takes advantage of the terrain's LOD system to remove tessellation at the maximum distance it's set to happen. Even if triangles are not generated, tessellation has a cost, so disabling it as soon as possible is a nice speedup. MicroSplat only exposes Distance based tessellation and doesn't expose as many options, but IMO it chooses the best options for you. Generally speaking, with MegaSplat I tried to expose all the options people might want, where as in MicroSplat I do the opposite and make more decisions for the user - my experience is that many Unity users don't really understand the tradeoff's that could be made in MegaSplat, so making them for them whenever possible makes sense.

 

@jbooth I might be able to do that tomorrow, but in the mean time, I actually got it working! Changing the Layer mode to two layers seems to just work, though I didn't think it would be required.

 

It shouldn't be - the most dominant texture should be put on the bottom layer and the lest dominant on the top layer, but maybe these got reversed at some point? If so, I would still expect to see some value on the other layer unless you used an entire texture across the map at low opacity..

 

Oh, so no tangents are being generated at all for your geometry? Yeah, that would be a problem, as you can't really have normal mapping without a tangent (well, there are techniques for this, but not the traditional kind), and would also break snow because the TBN matrix would be incorrect.

It would be possible to generate tangents automatically for a Unity terrain, or mesh which conforms to a terrain, but tangents generated in the shader will not be correct for an arbitrary mesh, since you need to base them on the UV directions, and you cannot assume the UV directions on an arbitrary mesh. I'm guessing the reason this worked on RTP is that RTP is expecting that you are putting the shader onto a Unity Terrain, which doesn't supply tangents and computes them in the shader- you can do this because the UV layout and topology is always the same, so computing them in the shader is an optimization.

You could modify the editor to let you turn on Project Tangents with Triplanar on. That should be trivial. But not that the tangents you get are going to be incorrect in some cases, causing the normals to look backwards - but maybe that's better than what you have now?

 

@jbooth - Whatever you do in the UV Project Axis mode to enable and make the Tangents, it works (my various biome terrains look amazing - wow). Without that checked, my normals, snow and Parallax do not work. When I check it they do. I would use this version of the shader except it doesnt work when my walls go to 90 degree. I haven't been successful in getting it working(adding) in triplanar mode though. Any chance you could show me what to add please(if its even possible)? I did add it to the editor but that doesn't seem to do anything.

 

Ah, I see, the project tangent function happens inside the UVProjection function, so unless it calls that it doesn't run the code. If you look in the megasplat_shared.txt file, you can see the project tangents functions, which all look like this:

Code (CSharp):

1. #if _PROJECTTANGENTS
2.                tangent.xyz = mul((float3x3)unity_WorldToObject, float3(1,0,0));
3.                tangent.w = worldNormal.y > 0 ? -1 : 1;
4.                #endif

This basically generates the tangent based on the top down projection. You can find additional versions of this code for projecting from the top, front, or side.

Since you have already hacked the editor to enabled the project tangents option with triplanar on, what you could do is change this code to something like this:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. float2 ProjectUVs(float3 vertex, float2 coords, float3 worldPos, float3 worldNormal, inout float4 tangent)
3.          {
4.  
5.             #if _TRIPLANAR
6.                #if _PROJECTTANGENTS
7.                tangent.xyz = mul((float3x3)unity_WorldToObject, float3(1,0,0));
8.                tangent.w = worldNormal.y > 0 ? -1 : 1;
9.                #endif
10.             return coords;
11.  
12.          }
13.  
14.  

This basically takes out all the code which does the UV projection and just leaves the tangent projection. If you've already hacked the GUI, you can then set it it to triplanar and turn on tangent projection, and it will do a top down projection for the tangents (same as a Unity Terrain shader does) and you'll get snow/normals back. If you want correct normal mapping, then you could compute the tangent basis for each axis and blend it based on the world normal direction, but a better solution is to have your voxel engine provider fix the tangents, as they should really be done at geometry generation time.

 

Awesome man, thanks I'll work on this solution tonight. I agree about getting it fixed in the engine, and I have sent a message to let the developer know. I have a feeling like it could take some time before I get an answer. Appreciate the support!

 

Hi,

We are using Megasplat in our newest project. We just upgraded to the latest version (1.6 from 1.56) and suddenly we can't paint puddles on the terrain painter (the param texture does not update for puddle painting, but it does for wetness and flow) and puddles no longer seem to show screen space reflections (they were before). We are in Unity 2017.2.

Is there something we are doing wrong?

 

I don't believe anything has changed with puddles or the painter between those versions - is this using a mesh workflow or a terrain workflow?

 

@jbooth - I played with the shader last night and got mixed results with your suggested change. The main issue being that if I add it to the procedural shader code, and then change a feature, it removes my changes. Is there somewhere I can set this and it not remove it if I enable a feature on the shader? Also, even when I added your code to the TriPlanar mode to project tangents in the shader, it made snow show up fine but normals still looked almost non-existent.

Looking at your example scene for procedural texturing, you can see even here the strange difference I am referring to between very little normal data when using TriPlanar mode, better looking in UV Project Axis, and even better with Project Tangents on. I put my procedural material on the terrains you provided, and switching between the toggle shows some pretty big differences in how the shader displays the normal, even though the texture looks the same (I use World mapping for both so the texture alignment is the same when switching between modes). Not sure about these terrains you provided but regardless of the tangent data, even without Project Tangents enabled on UV Project Axis, it looks a world better than the TriPlanar mode, normal wise. I'll provide some screenshots tomorrow to illustrate what I am seeing. I wonder though, even though the texture alignment is the same, smoothness and all that PBR goodness is the same as UV Project Axis, the normal in TriPlanar is not.

 

Add it to the fragment files in the MegaSplat/Editor/Fragments folder- this is where the code for the resulting shader is pulled from.

I'll take a look and see if I can repro your result..

 

I own both (as well as all of your MicroSplat extensions) and like what both offer, is there a way to use them together? Maybe MicroSplat for the initialization and broad strokes and MegaSplat for tweaking and fine tuning?

I also own a few of the Amplify Creations tools, and would like to learn how to integrate their Amplify Shader Editor and Amplify Texture packages. If I am not mistaken I should be able to use Amplify Texture with MegaSplat pretty easily, right? The shader editor is still new to me, so I don't even know the questions I'll have about integrating that. I do remember seeing a video with you using it though; I'll have to re-watch it.

I love your work, keep it up!

-bop

 

You can't really use both MicroSplat and MegaSplat on a single terrain- but you could use MegaSplat for meshes, and MicroSplat for terrains. The texture arrays are packed into the same format for both, so you could even share the texture data between them.

Amplify texture is a virtual texture system- this isn't really compatible with something like MegaSplat or MicroSplat, which use texture arrays and solve similar issues in the shader. There are some nodes for Amplify's shader editor included with MegaSplat, these expose the basic splat map technique used in MegaSplat so you can create your own shaders with it- but it's just the raw splat map technique used for meshes, not the suite of features that MegaSplat has in it's shaders.

 

Great explanation and insights into each. Everything would seem to have its own purpose. It'll be fun to check out the MegaSplat nodes. One of the things I might need to do is mesh versions of some of the terrains for LOD while travelling around; it would seem MegaSplat will be my go to for that. That I'll be using the same texture array makes it that much easier to get it up and running. I'll just stick to using Amplify Texture for other materials in the game.

Thanks for the fast response! I am sure you'll be hearing from me again.

-bop

 

You can likely just write a little component that puts the MicroSplat shader onto the mesh terrains. Unity's terrain system is just meshes under the hood, so if all you are doing is swapping to a low res mesh, it will render fine on there. Alternately, you can use the Render Baking section on the Terrain Component to bake out albedo/normal/smoothness/etc data from all the splat mapping and draw that in a regular old shader which will remove the need for all the splat map calculations, etc..

 

in the past texture packing process and TextureArrayConfig
did not cause my pc drastically Freezes
i do like the new feature, but when i attempt to add ~220 textures per array
unity gets memory eater till the pc is freezed unitl i kill unity or switch of my PC.

i did got a workaround by editing TextureArrayConfigEditor by disabling the Manual adding process and instead went for seeding through scripting
but even then the process takes around 15-20 minutes

the workaround did solve the Texture array creation issue for me , even with processing time.

but the problem is need of TextureArrayConfig file with VertixPaintPro tool ,
one click on the TAC file causes Freezing.

 

Are you generating these directly from substances? Because the substance export can add a lot more time.

With regular textures, the bulk of the time is spent copying the data into the textures and compressing them. In the old system, data was copied directly from the compressed texture into the array and the requirement was that every texture needed to be in the exact same format or an error would be thrown. This was fast an efficient, but a ton of Unity users didn't understand concepts like efficiently packing texture channels, texture format tradeoffs, etc.

The new way doesn't care what format you provide the textures in, or how many textures it's pulling them from, as it blits them into temporary buffers and compresses them. This is much friendlier for the average Unity user, but obviously can take quite a bit more time.

Does you memory rise the entire time you are doing this? It shouldn't increase in memory consumption- but perhaps a buffer is not being free'd properly due to a frame not ticking over during this process. I will investigate to see if I can reproduce a continuous rise in memory..

 

no it's just regular maps generated using External app ShaderMap 3.

it's a good change for sure. i'm not complaining here at all.

my workaround which by editing TextureArrayConfigEditor script is by disabling the manual entry process because my case was over 220 texture unlike the example file which are 60 textures , causes unity to eat memory last i checked it touched 10 GB of rams
i was able to see because i kept the taskManager on before i click on the file to be seen at unity inspector, most of the time the PC Freezes when the 220 textures are seeded to packer.

the problem is whenever the TAC file is has been clicked for inspection and it has 200 entries.

 

I wonder if it's actually not the packer at all, but the preview textures the editor is showing- Unity doesn't virtualize it's editor controls at all, so displaying 200 * 5 textures, plus cluster previews, etc, could add up. I'll see if there's any easy win on memory there..

 

So you mentioned it freezing when you just clicked on a config. Can you try commenting out like 550 of TextureArrayConfigEditor.cs where it says:

cfg.DrawLibraryGUI();

When the editor first shows, it can generate preview's for all the texture clusters by rendering spheres of them. This is the only potential heavy lifting done at this point (Well, except Unity's UI code, which allocates garbage like it's free, but nothing we can do about that).

 

i did comment out using the 60 tex from examples file.

it did went smoother than before.

i will however try it on the 220 tex , but i have other works at the moment for it i need the PC in stable condition once it's done i try it out.

 

Is there no forum for MicroSplat?

MicroSplat wind does not calculate the ambient light in the wind color. This brakes day/night environment features like UniStorm. The wind color goes black or very dark. Could you fix this please?

 

Sure there is:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/fre...ain-shading-system-for-unity-terrains.487458/

Are you referring to the wind particulate shadows? Because that whole system is part of the terrain itself, and thus lit as part of the terrain- however, what you might be asking for is if the wind particulate shadows can have ambient multiplied in. This is rather tricky, really, because which ambient do you mean? Ambient light in Unity is potentially a flat color, a horizon gradient, a GI probe, an enlighten bake, a progressive lightmapper bake, etc, etc.

 

Hi jbooth, horizon gradient. Thanks for the link, next time I will use the MicroSplat forum. In this special case that the sun goes down or the sun goes up in UniStorm. I would like the have the wind effect, it has a nice global effect.



Looks so in day time.

 

It's a terrain workflow.

Material is set to Simple puddles (rain and no rain on walls). I can paint wetness fine, but puddles remain at 1 across the whole texture and I can't modify it either by brush or by a fill.

We also get some crashes when changing material parameters (activating and deactivating puddles) or when I try to change a parameter on the instanced material by code (for example, the global porosity vector).

 

I’ll try to repro this; can you post a shot of the shader generation part of the material so I can match up the features? Also, if you have logs after the crash I’d be interested in seeing them to see if they are actually MegaSplat related..