Relief Terrain Pack (RTP) v3 on AssetStore

I don't know why but RTP sets all my detail textures resolutions to 128

 

Hello @tomaszek , I've read in the RTP manual that it is better to use 8 Layers instead of 4 Layers in the LOD manager, Does it really help to have more performance?.

 

I believe that your problems are related. If we render terrainin 2 passes (first pass+add pass) with "displace detail heightmaps' selected in LOD manager the passes and their meshes can be displaced different way - that's why we can have artifacts - underlying first pass that's black is seen somewhere. With no detail displace it does not matter how many passes we have. In deferred with 4+4 setup add pass (layers 5-8) is always rendered in forward - there is already exclude_path:deferred set in surface shader. in FarOnly shader watch out - there are 2 passes set in one subshader so there are 2 places you need to exclude deferred. Other than this I see no problems.

If you'd like to have 8 layers and tessellation working with detail displacement you need to render it in single pass using "8 layers mode" with atlasing.

Which textures exactly are set to small size ? RTP only affects detail normalmaps and heightmaps because their size need to match when they are grouped (normalmaps in pairs, heightmaps in quads). If you deselct RTP and then check every normalmap has the same size (might be anythings like 1k) and heigthmaps are the same (I'd recommend to not go for too high resolutions - 256x256 is enough in most situations). Then in RTP you can click refresh button under each normalmap and heightmap in layer properties tab - combined texture for normals and heights should go fine tiwh sizes of textures (look at RTP/combined textures tab).

Yes, rendering 8 layers in one pass (with no overlap selected in LOD manager) might be faster than rendering terrain twice in 2 passes. You need simply to check it yourself - performance depends on more factors (more complex shader for 8 layers but less drawcalls).

Tom

 

Hi @tomaszek,

That worked. Thanks for the quick reply. Really happy with rtp. The more you look through it the more you find

 

Hi. I've been playing around with the snow effect a bit. Overall it looks great (the glittering is really cool), but I have a few issues.

1) Right now, the snow doesn't blend in with my POM mountain texture, so the snow looks like it's hovering above the rocks. I tried changing the "Deep factor", but it didn't have any effect.

2) This is more of a wishlist, but it would be nice if you could disable so that the layer's Normal map and Superdetail doesn't affect snow. Right now the snow picks up very small details from those, so the snow is placed on very small patches, making it appear a bit unnatural and thin. The only solution I found was to remove the normal map from the base layer, and disable superdetail. Would also be nice if you could disable Global Perlin normal for snow, to make it look even smoother.

 

Any guidelines for how Substance Materials should be set up to import correctly? My normal maps keep coming in pink. The materials are spec/gloss with a height output. I set their compression to RAW and they're all the same size.

 

Hello Tomaszek

We run into a Problem while Starting a Build of our Project.
For every Terrain Scene we get a notification window telling us :

"_RTP_LODmanager object added to the scene. its script handles LOD properties of RTP
shaders."

The Output log contains the following error:
WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'Hidden/Relief Pack/ReliefTerrain-FarOnly' - Pass 'FORWARD' has no fragment shader
WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'Hidden/Relief Pack/ReliefTerrain-FarOnly' - Pass 'FORWARD' has no vertex shader
WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'Hidden/Relief Pack/ReliefTerrain-FarOnly' - Pass 'DEFERRED' has no vertex shader
WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'Hidden/Relief Pack/ReliefTerrain-FarOnly' - Pass 'META' has no vertex shader
WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'Hidden/Relief Pack/ReliefTerrain-FarOnly' - Pass 'CASTER' has no vertex shader
WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'Hidden/Relief Pack/ReliefTerrain-FarOnly' - All passes removed
WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'Hidden/Relief Pack/ReliefTerrain-FarOnly' - Setting to default shader.
WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'Relief Pack/ReliefTerrain-FirstPass' - Pass 'FORWARD' has no fragment shader
WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'ReliefPack/ReliefTerrain-FirstPass' - Pass 'FORWARD' has no vertex shader
WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'Relief Pack/ReliefTerrain-FirstPass' - Pass 'DEFERRED' has no vertex shader
WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'Relief Pack/ReliefTerrain-FirstPass' - Pass 'META' has no vertex shader
WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'Relief Pack/ReliefTerrain-FirstPass' - Pass 'CASTER' has no vertex shader
WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'Relief Pack/ReliefTerrain-FirstPass' - All passes removed

Buildsetup :
Forwardrendering
Gama colorspace
for DX11


It seem that our MultiScene editing setup, (the MasterTerrainScene contains LODmanager, the SubTerrainScenes hold one Terrians only ) does not work correctly.

Do we need a LODmanger in every! Terrain Scene?


We also would like to change the the "near sistance values" maximum, if it is possible.
At the moment it is clamped to a maximum of 50 for both parameters but we use a very big terrain it would be nice for us to know which variable we should change to adjust it to our needs.


Thanks

Marko

 

This might be newest Substance implementation in Unity differ from what I tested when releasing RTP. for such feature. You can always save your substances as tiffs (small gearwheel icon on the top right corner of substance inspector). RTP doesn't use textures as they are but combine them to pack resources so that's no difference, only makes working a bit more awkward with substances.

1) I'm affraid that's the way it's works in RTP and I can't change this behaviour without huge reimplementation of whole snow algorithm.
2) Normals are actually removed (softened/taken from normal detail texture higher mip levels) when it gets deeper. Where we clearly see underlying normals is situation where snow covers surface with thin layer.

More LOD managers doesn't hurt -they are added as soon as terrain with RTP component detects there is missing LOD manager in the scene. For erros - I'd need more details. Give me exact setup (LOD manager) and target platform and RTP version. Looks like Unity can't find feasible shader version for your setup which is weird. I'm on DX11 and tested most features recompiling RTP hunderd times.

Tom

 

I will send you the whole informations via e-mail if thats ok for you..

Marko

 

Hello Tomasz,

I had such issue so I accepted two options to not use tessellation at all or use only one terrain, but now I saw Your solution.
I followed instructions (newest RTP 3.3d from Asset Store) and the issue is less noticeable but it's still there.

 

Have it, but I'm wondering if I can reproduce your issue as it occurs only in build. Looks like something is missing under build conditions (cginc files for RTP shaders ?).

Tom

 

I see still some milimeter discrepancy on adjanced terrains (probably you test this on higher mountains). At this moment I can't halp more but I'll have this issue in mind in future developement. Could you try without bicubic filering ? Better to have such tessellation rather than none.

Tom

 

Unfortunately even if I disable bicubic filtering the problem still persists and yes I have high mountains on my terrain.
If You will have some other clues or proposition just let me know. Still Your product is top notch. Keep up the good work.

I think I read somewhere that You are working on some new product as a replacement of RTP in the future, is it true and what is the progress ?

 

Uninstalling RTP from a project

Could someone tell me how to uninstall RTP from my project?
I have tried it by deleting the whole RTP folder from my assets and removing the RTP component from the terrain and deleting the RTP controller from the hierarchy.
But that is not working. I think the compiled RTP shaders are still present, because the terrain turns pink from close by.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

 

In our project we want to use Gradient ambient, but changing the Equator color doesn't seem to have any effect on the terrain. The terrain is actually flat, so the vertex normals are all pointing up, but I thought the splat's normal maps and perlin noise map would modify the surface output normals enough that the equator color would have some effect. Do you have any insight into this?

 

Remove material from terrain (in Unity terrain settings).

Tom

 

I've tested this on example scene and it seems to work (set white albedo color for these layers to see pure ambient light influence on unlit part):



You might check if it's related to gfeature like global normalmap though or Unity lighting model (lightmaps) maybe.

Tom

 

Hmm, maybe I could try it with the normal map in your example?
If I look at the example scene in the RTP package (TerrainScene.unity) and force o.Albedo to white in the shader, I get this:
In the middle where I raised the terrain to be flat, none of the equator color shows through. Even though it's flat, I was hoping I could get some equator to show through just based on the splat's normal map.

I'm not using lightmaps or the global normalmap (although I am using the tiled perlin noise). Maybe there's another setting I've missed.

 

Cant post anything via desktop pc on the forums. Reply button of that new broken forum is not responding to clicks. So posting from mx mobile phone now which luckily displays the old forum.

1) does 2-pass rendering (4+4) always result in forward shading? Or is there a way to keep the terrain in deferred? Without doing everything in one pass (8 layer mode).

2) what scripts and shaders do I need to touch to increase the blend distance of the "no detail colors at far distance"?

 

ReliefTerrainGlobalSettingsHolder.cs:1809: should be UNITY_WEBGL not UNITY_WEB_GL

 

Your screenshot looks correct. Example scene terrain is not in shadow - that's why you don't have pure gradient color out there.On top we see greenish tint, on cliffs we see reddish one. In theory pure red would be invoked on 90degree cliff which can't be even produced by terrain engine.

New forums has been closed as far as I know and Unity returned to old one after users were ... not much pleased...

1. 4+4 means - forward on the 2nd pass.
2. Perlin tab has slider which affects where far distance starts.

I'll take a look. Thanks

Tom

 

1. Ok I see. We should probably use "Camera Normals" in HBAO (posteffect from Asset Store) then if we want to use 4 + 4 pass rendering.
2. Thx. But what script or shader holds the slider values that we are limited to? I want to change the limits of the sliders.

 

Look at ReliefTerrainEditor.cs and find this slider by its label.

Tom

 

Thank you, this works
Do you 've got an idea what might lock the "Starting value" of the perlin noise normal to always be 0? I cannot interact with the slider.

 

It's related to near distance set in RTP/Settings/Main - set close distance start to 0 to be able to set perlin "far distance" start to 0

 

I understand this, but as my terrain is completely flat (for gameplay reasons), I wondered if the normals from the splat normal maps themselves would allow some gradient contribution - obviously not pure gradient, but if the vertex normal is upwards, and the normal-map pixel normal was at 45 degrees, wouldn't there be some gradient contribution?

Thanks, Joe

 

Actually ambient lighting is left to Unity lighting pipeline (RTP has surface shader). I checked your issue also on Unity built-in terrain shaders and it seems to be indeed not working - on flat surfaces detail bumps, however correct (I can check them separately in deferred), they don't take equator color. Only ground color has influence where equator should has it, so maybe - handling ground color might be workaround for you.

Tom

 

[Paid] Looking for someone to create a nice, small tropical island using RTP and your choice of terrain editor. Please message me with examples.

 

Okay first of all, im a complete n00b. Thats always a great way to start off a cry for help forum post, right?

Here's a screenshot of my issue: https://gyazo.com/57913c80db0faff97b45aa9a96d6c961
wherever I move my character, a black area follows him around.

So I was messing around with different settings, trying to get a hang of what RTP can offer. I changed a few settings and then the above in the image started to happen. I un-did all the settings, or at least i reversed all the settings I thought I changed, and this is still happening.

Is there any setting in RTP that would cause this behavior? Im using RTP with World Creator too, if that makes a difference.

Also, Im attempting to use substances with RTP but...when I import it and the textures are applied, they look nothing like the substance. Is there more to using substances in RTP than just selecting them, making the substance RAW and then getting images?

 

Well I was able to fix the issue in that prior screenshot by removing RTP from WC and removing the RTP Lod Manager. I then reselected RTP as the terrain shader in WC and when I hit start the shadow surrounding the character is gone.

However....my terrain looks like this now. https://gyazo.com/819bc29d17448025f7fb2f6d51b0b438
I am so confused.

Heres a link to my project. the scene I'm working in is Test Scene 3 which is located in assets->the unforgotten souls->scenes
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9MBFie9jHhUZURBaV9JUW9hcms/view?usp=sharing

 

Your issue of dark area surrounding the player seems to be related to perlin noise normals being wrong. When you visit settings/perlin normals tab RTP rebuilds this texture into RG channels of combined texture that can be seen RTP?Combined Texture/Special Combined. You need to check if such texture is there and is correct (to my refer example scene setup for comparison).

Removing any components of RTP will most probably result in even more broken behaviour. LOD manager is responsible for recompiling RTP shaders and storing current features list / setup. Terrain component looks at this and shows correct set fo fetures in ReliefTerrain component inspector. It also might influences some behaviours.

Take care of:
1. Your terrain has 4 or 8 layers before RTP is added to it
2. You're using most recent RTP version (which is 3.3d, 3.3c had a bug on multiterrain support)
3. You recompiled shaders in LOD manager
4. You follow guidelines from my pdf doc (you can look at first steps video as well - it's done in RTP3, but 3.3 only more simplified).
5. Check textures used by RTP are correct (as above)

For substance - the reason we can't use them directly is that RTP needs a lot of texture resources in shader and many of them are used internally by Unity. As we're short on it it's hard to squeeze everything into working shader and not break 16 textures limit. That's why detail normalmaps are being combined into pairs and detail heightmaps are combined in quads. This makes "substance on demand" unusable here.

Tom

 

When using RTP with a Colormap, the first texture slot is normally used by the original terrain engine as the equivalent of a colormap. But since you have a dedicated colormap, this could of been freed up. This first texture slot will tile over the colormap, since RTP uses a common tiling value for all textures. The only way to prevent this is to use the first slot as a transparent image. Which work fine, except it wastes the texture slot. This would only be a factor for somebody who wants 100% of the colormap to show in certain areas. Such as a real map. Anyway to get around this?

 

It was designed to work like this in Unity3. In Unity4 we had an option to use materials, so such behaviour was optional (although using materials might cause heavy CPU load on multiple terrains). Since RTP for Unity5 global colormap is not stored in detail texture #1 any more. Did I miss something ?

Tom

 

I believe developers should learn from @tomaszek how to make a manual. Great job. But I didn't understand this sentence from the manual:

What is static batching and how to do it?

Also there is a typo at the last line but two, page 33 of 97. It should be "values" but it is written "velues".

And I strongly believe this asset is really underrated, I mean Unity3D must hire the author of this asset and then we could have the best shaders even better than the CryEngine's.

 

Static batching - I would need to refer to Unity docs about it maybe. The idea is to manually combine some objects in proximity so they are rendered in "one shot" instead of several CPU -> GPU calls which causes performance problems. Of course static batching is well known technique. In RTP we could decide how/which ones objects to combine - otherwise Unity would do it the way we don't like (can cause black z-figthing between underlying and overlying objects)..

Tom

 

Hi Tom,

there are some issues with RTP that I need a sparring partner to talk about:
1) Hard edges at nearby terrain patches. Looks like a basemapDistance issue. All terrains are set to 100 units for their basemapDistances - not by me though. Something is resetting them to 100 every time I deselect and reselect a terrain.
So I guess it is RTP doing that. From looking at your Editor code I seem to understand that it should equal start distance + fade length which can both be set in the perlin noise tab. But adding up these values should result in much larger distance than 100.
Is my assumption correct? If not, what is causing the basemapDistance to be so close to the camera?

2) Sides of mountains lose darker shading the further the camera backs away from the terrain. This can be hidden by activating shadow casting on all terrains. Costly. Is this related to some distance slider in the terrain setup?

3) Shadows themselves are popping into or out of existence based on camera distance. They don't seem to account for the fade length of shadows as in Unity Quality Settings.


I hope you can shed some light onto my questions.

 

1. Basemap distance is determined by RTP/Settings/Main - close distance, close distance fade. Don't play with it manually because it might reveal seams. Very close duistance use firstpass/addpass shader. Farther I use basemap shader which is basically RTP shder (not that simplistic shader used by Unity) but with some more expensive features like parallax turned off.

2. Looks like there's something wrong with normals - do you use global normalmap feature - is global normalmap correctly setup ?

3. Might be related to 2nd question/issue. At first glance hard to say what's the reason.

Tom

 

1. Hmkay. Near Distance and Near Distance Fade it is. Thx for correcting me.
2. Yes we use global normal map. I'm not sure if the current global normal map is accurately matching the underlying heightmap - but it is set up as a normal map in Unity and produces valid shading when applied to the Unity standart shader.

 

Hi Tom,

First of all, I want to say that I really like your work. RTP is a really great plugin for Unity terrain.

I'm actually working with some colleges on a Ski/Snowboard game.
We already have tried some stuff to generate snow trails behind the player, but without terrain.
(Tesselation shader with displacement map generate at runtime, ...)

But we would like to use a terrain so I was wondering if by any chance it would be possible to achieve this with RTP DX11 tessellation, or by modifying height or tessellation maps ?

 

Hi, if you ask about current RTP state - this is not implemented. It's possible to implem,ent this, but this is not that straightforward - if you're shader wise you can tweak RTP shaders yourself - they are surface shaders provided with full source code.

Tom

 

Hello, I am just experimenting with deferred and forward rendering and here is the difference between the 2.

Color space is linear.

Is this good or am I doing something wrong? I dont know what the difference in looks should be exactly since I just started tweaking it, so I am wondering if I set something up wrong, since forward looks much better? (but maybe it is supposed to be like that)

Deferred:


Forward:

 

Looking to the sceenshoot looks like you have a problem between Linear and gama.
Look into the manual.
http://docs.unity3d.com/460/Documentation/Manual/LinearLighting.html

I think you need to add a post process effect. But here it is the manual rendering path:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/RenderingPaths.html

and other explanations

• http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/articles/forward-rendering-vs-deferred-rendering--gamedev-12342
  
• http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/Piot.../Unity_forward_vs_deferred_rendering_path.php

more tech: http://www.3dgep.com/forward-plus/

pay tutorial about basic rendering path and setup
I do not like to make promotion but this course help me:

• https://teamtreehouse.com/library/cameras-in-unity
• https://teamtreehouse.com/library/lighting-in-unity
• https://teamtreehouse.com/library/image-effects-in-unity

But look in youtube i remember a specific video.

 

Tom, I apologize for the late response. I got really caught up trying to figure out what I did wrong. So I started from scratch and imported all the assets i want to use 1 at a time, resolving errors before importing the next one. I should have done that from the start. RTP now works as expected, expect for one thing.

When I enabled Tri-Plannar in 4-layer, it did not apply it right away to the terrain. My mountains still had stretched textures. I then enabled Global Normal, played around with that, didn't like the results so I disabled it. Then the Tri-Pannar worked and my textures were no longer stretched. Is this normal? I'm still going through your manual too.

Thanks!!
-Jon

 

Maybe you missed recompiling shaders in LOD manager after you enabled triplanar ?

Tom

 

This is a bit off-topic but I thought I would share the link to easily search inside 102 pages of RTP forum only.

http://forum.unity3d.com/search/1971443/?searchform=1&t=post&o=date&c[thread]=206516

It may be nice a addition to post number 1, unless this is common knowledge. I just discovered how to do this very recently. Hopefully it saves some new users some frustration when trying to search.

 

Well sort of, sounds like I will have to continue using a transparent texture to when I want the colormap to show through 100%

I have another issue though. Everything works like a champ, until I attempt to use the 8 pass version. I end up with my terrain completely black. I imagine it didn't generate the atlas. Do I need to do more than just check off 8 pass and recompile the shaders?

 

Hi Tom,

I finally modify the RTP shaders (RTP_Base,RTP_AddBase, and ReliefTerrain-FirstPass,AddPass,FarOnly)
to move the tessellation vertices with a new heightmap generated on the fly by a script.
(I also try to generate this map with compute shaders, but it's another story. )

In the RTP_Base/RTP_AddBase cginc files
At the beginning

Code (cg):

1. #ifdef SNOW_DISP
2. sampler2D _DispTex;
3. float _DispStrength;
4. #endif

And after the tessellation code.

Code (cg):

1. #ifdef SNOW_DISP
2. float d = tex2Dlod(_DispTex, float4(v.texcoord.xy,0,0)).r * _DispStrength;
3. v.vertex.xyz += v.normal * d;
4. #endif

And of course the #define SNOW_DISP in the shaders files.

It work more or less, but I realise that I must have a big resolution heightmap to displace little space like snow tracks or trails. And I don't know how to reslove this problem.

I've seen this blog where they show the Tomb Raider SnowTech : http://tombraider.tumblr.com/post/131825841425/dev-blog-snow-tech-and-houdini-simulations-mike

 

Hey Tom, i have the following problem with rtp:
First of all i'm using rtp version 3.3d and im on 5.3.4 unity version. Everything runs nice in the unity editor, terrain looks fine and the textures looks amazing. But when i try to play on a Windows Build the whole terrain is pink. All the 7 textures I'm using are pink and just like I mentioned before that only happens on windows build, meanwhile on the editor everything looks fine. Also I got this error that I can't get rid off "Shader error in "Hidden/Relief Pack/ReliefTerrain-AddPass:' maximum ps_5_0 sampler register index(16) exceeded at Assets/ReliefPack/Shaders/ReliefTerrain/RTP_AddBase.cginc(601) (on d3d11)"

 

Turn off lighmaps in LOD manager.

 

Howdy,

I just got Terrain Composer 2 and have just started using RTP with it. I read all the documentation but I have three questions.

1st, when it comes to multiple geom blend objects, is this compatible with TC2? Since TC2 can place multiple trees/bushes/rocks/whatever, can RTP somehow geom blend all the objects placed by TC2 at once?

2nd, I wanted to do caves with the hole cutting option. But does the terrain have to be a mesh in order for it to work? Or does it work on regular Unity terrain?

3rd, I am getting this error and don't know how to fix it:

MissingComponentException: There is no 'Renderer' attached to the "Terrain Area" game object, but a script is trying to access it.
You probably need to add a Renderer to the game object "Terrain Area". Or your script needs to check if the component is attached before using it.
UnityEngine.Renderer.get_bounds () (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/generated/common/runtime/GraphicsBindings.gen.cs:1498)
ReliefTerrain.InitTerrainTileSizes () (at Assets/ReliefPack/Scripts/ReliefTerrain/ReliefTerrain.cs:175)
ReliefTerrain.RefreshTextures (UnityEngine.Material mat, Boolean check_weak_references) (at Assets/ReliefPack/Scripts/ReliefTerrain/ReliefTerrain.cs:254)
ReliefTerrain.Awake () (at Assets/ReliefPack/Scripts/ReliefTerrain/ReliefTerrain.cs:190)

How does one add a "renderer" to a terrain or terrain tile?

Thanks in advance!