[Released] Vertex Tools Pro – Heightbased PBR Material Blending, Flowmapping and Mesh Deform

It's like you said: The 2 mat. blend shader has the same features, but limited to 2 materials. The only exception is the new wetness, but this will be implemented in a following update very soon.

 

Hi,
It looks great! How it work on mobile? Is the performance good for mobile when I use it?

 

Hey thanks! I already answered a similar question in a previous post.
The performance depends on what settings you use in the shader and the features you use (for example parallax would be a heavy effect on mobile, but heightblending itself should work just fine), so there is no general answer to that question.
Also be aware that at the moment mobile is limited to the 2 material blend shader.

 

Looks awesome!

What happens with the original textures when I paint with your tool? Do you give us the option to duplicate the meterial and its textures, or to changing the original one?

I have more copies of houses and I want to change some of them. All have the same material.

 

The textures itself are not changed. That's the trick.
The blending information get stored directly in the vertex data of the meshes.

So you can share one material across houses and still paint every one of the houses totally different. Thus, since only that one material and its unmodified textures are used, decrease draw calls and save performance

 

one last question is the demo included or its more simpler one `?

 

We decided to remove the demoscene from the package due to the indredible huge download size and issues when download from China. Nevertheless there are simpler demo scenes included, and basic textures to start with.

Additionally we have the demoscene available as a standalone demo for Win and Mac.

 

Thank you very much. Got a new costomer.

 

Have been wanting to purchase this since it wasn't even released and now, i couldn't pass the opportunity of the discount
Can't wait to give this a try, it looks like a fantastic tool! You got a new customer here

 

me too!

 

We are looking forward to seeing this on your georgous FPS

 

I'll try to show the tool in action sometime

 

Looks fantastic! I'm assuming this works with ProBuilder without any issues, correct?

 

Unfortunately there are some known bugs, when using VTP and Probuilder at the same time. So currently we wouldn't recommend it.

 

Is that something you're looking into and hopefully will have a fix?

 

Probably not in the next couple of Weeks sorry about that

 

Sorry if this has already been answered, but I've had a look through the documentation and I can't find much information on how painting at run-time works. I've been looking for a way of procedurally drawing damage onto objects and wondering if this could do that? Specifically, I want to be able do paint a 'damage' texture on the spot where a projectile has hit an object.

 

Hey Braddas,

our API enables you to call draw methods from script at runtime. So a simple drawWithColorAtPoint(Color,Point) will draw the affected vertices with the selected color.

Since this is all about vertex painting, it is not possible to draw some kind of decals on the exact spot where a projectile hit the mesh. The damage will always be drawn at the nearest vertex and also softly fade out.

 

Hello, trying to use the API to paint my own mesh but any use of

Code (CSharp):

1. currentVertices[  currentTriangles[triangle*3 + i]

results in an IndexOutOfRangeException?

 

Okay thanks, that makes sense. Is a 'point' in this context the target vertice? I'm assuming I also have control of the brush size and falloff etc, are there any editor controls that aren't available at run-time?

 

I wrote you a direct message

Falloff isn't available, the other ones are

 

Is there a way to get deformation to work across UV seams?



Also, any plans for Substance Material support?

 

hi there,
i bought the asset while it was on sale to give it a try.
unfortunately i have to say that the provided shaders are far from being polished:
- performance is worse than it could be as it is killed by a lot of "if"s.
- height based blending does not work properly as tiling factors are not taken into account (leading to floating texture issues), neither is the heightmap itself: heights simply sum up? that leads to some very strange rendering artifacts.

as you can see on the left: cobble stones totally get corrupted by the sand when using different tiling factors and different extrusion values whereas sand should not influence cobble stones at all.

 

Indeed, we had a solution but decided to ditch it, since it killed editor performance when working on higher poly meshes. But we may just bring that back as a checkbox.

Not yet. But we will discuss that soon.

Well, that is something that is going to be adressed with the next 2 updates. But we definitly can not confirm the "bad" and "killed". Take a look at our standalone demo scene running smoothly at Full HD with Full PostFX. Nevertheless, of course a little bit of performance can still be saved.

Tiling factors are taken into account. But you have to be careful: Tiling is just defined by the Main Textures tiling to increase performance. You can also take a look at the documentation. If you need separate tiling on all the different textures, just get in touch, we can pass you a custom separate tiling shader.

I do not quite understand what you mean with add up?

This is properly due to the Parallax at steep angles. Blended Parallax at steep angles like your camera always lead to some artifacts We are still working on getting the issue less visible with some parallax angle modifier. But it still in early alpha stages. If you want to have perfect heightbased blending at every angle, tesselation is you way to go. (See screenshot attached). Beta is available. Release in the next couple of weeks.

 

It's good to hear that performance optimizations are being addressed. Lars is someone I would trust with his assessment of a product like this. I hope we can expect to see improvements.

 

Hey, i have some issues with the shaders, not sure if its my mistake by not supplying the correct maps or if its something else.
I am working on a MacOSX (El Capitan).
The issue is, as soon as i use normal maps the textures gets black under most light-angles. Once i disable the normal-maps the issue is gone (but well, no normal maps then...).
I generate all textures with MapLab, so i assume the base textures (Height, Occlusion, Smoothness, Emission) are correct. I combine them with the texture packer. Everything works, height-based blending etc... but as soon as i put in the normal maps the problem with the black textures appear.
In the preview window of the Material, everything looks fine, its just in the scene-view that everything is messed up.

Any ideas what i do wrong?

EDIT:
Already solved... it was really a stupid mistake. I just forgot to check that the normal-textures are indeed set to "Normal Maps" under the image-importer settings...
Well, lesson learned =)

 

I have some feedback for the tool.

When i enable the paint mode, it will change the layer of the object to an empty layer.
If i paint and save it without doing anything else, it reverts the layer back to normal ok, but if i happen to select another object or maximize the window, it will break the paint mode and the layer won't revert back. I also need to re-enable and disable the paint mode to get the scene view back to normal.

The tool should work when maximizing the scene view while in paint mode (or at least disable the paint mode when that happens). It should also check if a new object is selected while in paint mode, and if so, also disable the paint mode and revert the layer back.

 

Oh totally missed that maximizing thing. Will be fixed in the next update! Thanks for the Feedback.

 

Hi,

Bought this to play with over the weekend, and loving what I am seeing so far. Very handy tool.

Just hit a road block though. It doesn't seem to want to generate anything bigger than 1024 on both albedo and combined texture packers. It gets stuck in the same place every time as seen in the image below.

Running on a fairly high spec work station and gave it a good 20 mins, but it was totally stuck.

Any idea what might be causing this?

Many thanks

 

Hey there,

this is a bug we could not reproduce constantly yet.

But just hitting generate again (while the loader is still there) solves the issue for now. Hope to get this fixed withing the next updates.

Addition: Generating shall also only take a few seconds

 

Thanks for the speedy reply.

Brilliant! Just tested it and it is fine. I don't mind clicking twice

This is the beauty of paying for an asset rather than getting an alternative freeware one ~ SUPPORT! Well worth the coinage. I know this is a fairly new asset, so it is bound to have a bug here and there.

Ta very much pal.

 

You may not be aware, but your asset store page is still pointing the Forums link to the recent new forum fiasco. You might want to link back to these forums at some point.

 

Oh thanks a lot for the hint
Totally forget about that! Lovely comment

 

Hello, I'm liking the software, but have a issue that i can't seem to solve.
When my object is parented under another gameobject, the brush won't appear when trying to paint the vertex colours. I can still use the 'Flood Fill with Colour', there just isn't a brush. If I then drag the object out of the hierarchy, the brush starts working. My parent object has its own mesh collider and rigidbody, could it be interfering in any way? Is this anything to do with the VertexStreamChildrenRebuilder script, I'm not really sure how to use it.
Thanks!

 

Hi, could I get some info on that as well? I'm not entirely sure how to set it up. I have it nested in a Raycast at the moment.

Does the object on the receiving end of the raycast (the object to be painted) require anything special beyond the correct shader?

 

I've worked that out now. Can I just confirm however that to get the painting working at runtime, it needs to be a mesh collider formed of the rendered mesh? I.E. not a lower poly collider?

 

Hi @PitHeimes

I'm having trouble getting consistency between Substance Painter and the VTP shader. See below, left rock is the intended look, using the Unity Standard Metallic Shader, right rock is using VTP metallic:


The smoothness map is basically having no effect on the surface, despite the slider being set to 1. I'm really keen to dig into VTP and see what it can do, but this issue is holding me back, and making things look bad.

The combined map was made with Substance Painter using the following settings:



I've also tried spitting out the maps individually, and using the texture assistant to combine them, but it's giving me the same result.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
Mark

 

Hi guys, I bought your asset and it's amazing and already rated with 5 stars =)

I have a question for you... I'm working in an stylized game and I really wan to use VTP in it. The point is that I can't apply different tiling and offset values to my textures because this values seem to be linked with the albedo map ones, in other words at least in my project the only tiling and offset that works are the albedo ones, and I can see any change by touching the other ones.

My idea so far is to use the normal & combined map in 1-1 both tiling and offset to have the "macro" shape but then play with the albedo with higher values in order to have something like a detail texture. There's actually a way to do that?

Thanks in advance!!

 

This could possibly be due to the collider of the parent object - Though normally that should not happen.
Could you try to disable the collider of the parent and confirm that it works afterwards? Thanks!

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Yeah, that is correct. We missed to document that and will fix that in the next update Thanks for figuring that out!

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I just checked my own Substance Painter export preset and saw that I always export the glossiness map under converted maps, not the input glossiness map (see attached screenshot). Could you try this?


--------

Please get in touch with us via mail (support@vertextools.pro)
We can provide you with a shader variant that allows separate tiling on the different maps

 

Tried this, no noticeable difference.

Also tried reimporting VTP from the asset store, didn't change anything.

I'm kind of hoping that I've just left something on the wrong setting, but I'm running out of ideas. I feel like I've tried everything.

Edit: Bit of extra information, when I play with the smoothness strength slider on the shader, I can see it having a slight effect, but the max setting for it gives it only a fraction of the effect that the map should be having on the look of the object. It's like setting the slider to 1 is the equivalent of 10% strength or something.

 

Could you give us the Unity version you are working with?

 

Sorry for the delay, I'm using 5.4.0f3 Personal.

 

For any users who may have the same, strange issue:
Checking "Bypass sRGB Sampling" in the import settings of your combined map does the trick

 

Thanks for your help @PitHeimes !

Excellent customer service!

 

@PitHeimes

I can't get the shader to work in a WebGL 1 build. The model that uses VTP is completely transparent.

I see that you were able to make a WebGL 1 build. Could you elaborate what steps I need to take to make this work? You wrote that you used "Simple HeightBased Blending". What exactly does that entail? I'm not using parallax, and I'm only using the "2 Texture Blend" shader for testing purposes.

I of course use an external program to paint the vertex paint for obvious reasons, I hope that doesn't effect component stripping upon building somehow.

EDIT: I'm using Unity 5.3.6f1

 

Hey Staffan,

the webGL Shader is a variant of our shaders we deliver with Vertex Tools Pro.
Please contact us at support@vertextools.pro and we can send you the webGL Shaders (Currently beta, though no problems occured so far). We will also add them to the AssetStore Package within the next 2 releases

 

@PitHeimes

I have sent the mail. Thank you very much. I will be sure to report any issues I have with the shaders.

 

@PitHeimes

I can't get it work to my unity version 5.3.5f1 with iOS build setting that using OpenGL4.1. All the shaders are transparent. It was weird that when I switched to 2 texture metallic, it worked for a while. However, when I close the project and reopen it, all shaders do not work. I am using Mac OSX EI Capitan. Do you have any idea what is going on?

 

Hey! I just bought your asset. It's pretty cool. I have a question though, I would like to have the option to only paint certain channels of the vertex color, like paint only red channel, or only green channel at a time. The problem is there is no way to isolate a single color channel and paint it without the other channels going black.

Lets say for example there is a vertex color like so: (0, 0.5, 0.75)

If I paint with a red color (1, 0, 0), instead of becoming (1, 0.5, 0.75) the value is now (1, 0, 0).

The green and blue color values are being wiped out. Is there a way to modify the painter so it can isolate to specific color channels?

 

All of the 2 Tex-Blend shaders shouldwork without any problem on mobile. Could you export a demoscene and email it to: support@vertextools.pro? Any console logs? Thanks!

Just contact us at support@vertextools.pro to get the latest beta this week with the requested feature