Relief Terrain Pack (RTP) v3 on AssetStore

Sure, I believe as any mature system it just have a lot of features which could look overwhelming at first. So, will RTP4 be very different from RTP3 or knowledge of v3 "slightly upgraded" by reading change log is a good way to go? I just fear to get into situation like at my previous project. I was not able to convince director to switch into using RTP, because he saw 90 pages of documentation and asked if I am familiar with this product enough to teach our level designers to work with it in a few days. I was not, so next time I am going to be prepared to promote RTP in appropriate way

 

RTP4 will be different, but ... in good manner. I'll put my efforts not only on making it fast, reliable and hi-tech but also user friendly. Also upgrade fees (RTP4 is pretty different at code level) will be favorizing a lot current RTP users.

Tom

 

Hi Tom,

will RTPv4 finally also be adapted for mobile devices? Today, you should also be able to create stunning graphic effects on mobile devices.

 

RTP3 already works on GLES3 hardware. The techniques I've got in mind might be not suitable now, but in time it should work fine (target 4.0 or 4.5 is what would be needed, at least target 3.5 that supports texture arrays).

Tom

 

I might be missing something, but what's the best way to get the terrain effects such as snow to carry over to meshes like rocks and boardwalks? I need to keep a specular setup for photoscanned assets. I'm looking to animate the snow and/or rain values based on player progression. As a side question, how would I go about changing the snow strength from code?

Thanks!

 

Hi Tom,

I fixed all the problems above following your guidance.

Spent alot of time trying to fix "the light" problem and i found that when i save the normal maps from RTP they save in sRGB + bipalanr filter mode rather than NON sRGB + Triplanar. I just switch them to Triplanar and no more light problem.

RTP still throw an error (SetPixels32 called with invalid number of pixels in the array) when i try to save "atlasing" texture but managed to fix the wirred appreance of the terrain by switching the Atlasing texture to sRgb (RTP save them with NO sRGB)... Didn't get your expelanation about texture limit. All my layer have texture of 1024x1024 and All the textures exported by RTP are in 1024x1024 (i gess in my case my Atlasing texture should be 2Kx2k ?) how i can prevent RTP from thrwoing SetPixels32 error ?

Thanks

 

Please, give me eact RTP version (verinfo.txt file placed in ReliefPack folder) and Unity version you're developing it. I'll try to reproduce your issue at the beginning of the next week.

Tom

 

Hey Tom,
I encounter a shading issue with geometry blended objects.
Some of these objects (flat planes modeled and UV-ed in Maya) appear darker than others when seen from far away.
Up close their luminance values seem to equal that of the others (they gradually get brighter the closer I move the camera).
This darkening happens the moment I hit the Save Scene button. Any ideas what might cause this?

 

Good afternoon. my question is this. I have many pieces that are loaded and unloaded. On each piece of the card weighs the RTP script. (do I need it there or can I delete it?) I made all the combined textures and saved them. (it was necessary to do this or not?) Also on each piece there is a splatmap. (I need to save them the same way or not?) When loading scenes, I have peaks and the global map with the normal is done, please write about these moments .It is necessary or not to save all the textures to a file if I have The scenes are loaded and unloaded.

 

RTP3.3h for U5.5 & U5.6 (submitted from Unity5.5.0p3), U2017.1.0b9 tested

Other question :

How i can make an object (plane) that use GeomBlend as a prefab w/o losing the blend with the terrain ?. Actualy I can do the geom blend in the scene but when i apply the prefab and load it again it loose the "the copy mesh" generated by the geomblend. I tryied to use the export OBJ feature but it export a "simple plane" ... its a little confusing..

Thanks

 

Geom blend shaders takes some global textures used by RTP (like global colormap for example). If the issue happens when you save scene it gives me a clue than your issue is kind of refreshing issue only. After you hit "Refresh all" in RTP or press play the darkening should be solved.

Take care of scene textures hold in scene as RTP script objects. They can loose their reference when placed in geom blend prefabs. So - after you get the terrain working fine save all textures used by RTP shader (combined, atlases, global colormap). So - you can even check if you don't miss a texture in geom blend material after saving.

Tom

 

Look above - geom blend meshes are scene objects until ou save them to assets (you can find easily free editor scripts that can save any mesh attached to mesh filter). Scene object references are lost when you make any object that's an asset (prefab is an asset file on the disk). It's best to save mesh as an asset, not for example obj file because of possible compatibility issues as obj's might not port all data stored in mesh (like uv2, colors, etc.)

The same is for material used for rendering geom blend boejct - it's scene object until you save it.
Script side of saving objects to assets is pretty straightforward though. It's basically one line of code that can solve it. If you plan to use RTP scene objects as prefabs take a look at:

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/AssetDatabase.CreateAsset.html

Tom

 

The error itself doesn't break script execution. It does only say that RTP script tries to set 2 highest mip levels which is somehow forbidden (huh, somebody tell my why???). Anyway - the console error output is harmless and doesn't affect the way saving the texture works. As I can see now I even missed the fact that we only need to feed the topmost mip level of the texture when saving to PNG as this texture format doesn't store MIPs at all. They are recalculated on the import. So, the problematic code part in ReliefTerrainEditor.cs

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. for (int mip = 0; mip < tex.mipmapCount; mip++)
3. {
4.     Color32[] cols = tex.GetPixels32(mip);
5.     ntex.SetPixels32(cols, mip);
6.     ntex.Apply(false, false);
7. }
8.  

can easily look like this and will work exactly the same way w/o reporting the error:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. // (we can simply skip higher mips when creating PNG)
3. //for (int mip = 0; mip < tex.mipmapCount; mip++)
4. {
5.     int mip = 0;
6.     Color32[] cols = tex.GetPixels32(mip);
7.     ntex.SetPixels32(cols, mip);
8.     ntex.Apply(false, false);
9. }
10.  

Thanks for sharing this incosistency. I'll keep it updated in next minor RTP3 release.
I'll also take care of correct sRGB flag treatment as its logic is now (newest Unity) inverted comparing to what was previous - i.e. non color textures like normalmaps or heightmaps should be saved right way (linear) while color textures (atlases) should have sRGB flag checked.

ATB, Tom

EDIT: I've just submitted RTP3.3i with above fixes included.

 

Hi Tom,

we are experiencing problem while we pre-warm shaders - it gets stuck on RTP for various amount of time - from few seconds to minute. Do you have any idea if this is normal or how we should solve it?

Thanks!

 

You pre-warm it all at the game start? RTP is complex shader, but it doesn't introduce many variants itself - only shader feature LODs (simple, parallax, pom, pom selfshadowed). If you use parallax in LOD manager then shaders will be compiled with 2 variants only (simple/parallax).

Unity introduces a lot of variants itself (for all lighting scenarios). You could try to strip it from build.

RTP consists of a few shaders - first-pass, ad-pass, far-pass (for terrain), then geom blend shaders and shaders on meshes. If they are not used in your project they shouldn't get included into build. Depending on number of terrain layers used you could strip add-pass shader (it's dependent one at the end of first-pass shader code - take a look).

Tom

 

Hi Tomas,

How can I apply splatmaps to mesh objects? I have a mesh of my terrain broken into many smaller pieces. I wish to apply my splatmaps using RTP latest version but I cannot find in the Inspector where to assign them. I can only find where to assign the Splat Detail Maps.

I have checked all of the "RTP Standalone\Parallax Mapped Triplanar" shaders.

Thanks!

 

If you use mesh replacement for terrain use the same script as you would use on terrain and attach splatmaps in RTP inspector / coverage tab. This is the way it works on my example scene Terrain2Geometry. If the mesh is split while you want to use one one splat texture you need to uv map meshes (main UVs) accordingly - whole terrain sectio is mapped 0..1 x 0..1 top planar xz. So - for example if you have 4 rectangular chunks for whole terrain you would need to uv map them (0,0) to (0.5, 0.5), (0.5,0) to (1, 0.5), (0, 0.5) to (0.5, 1), (0.5, 0.5) to (1,1).

Tom

 

Good afternoon. How can I reduce the size of these cards? I save them and make a compression. but I can not replace them. More precisely, I can replace them, but the maps still refer to the terrain maps

 

Refresh all did nothing to improve the situation. Most of our scene textures are saved outside the scene already.
I've got another idea and need your insight:
Since we use global maps (normal, color and your perlin normal) I have a feeling that the shading issues might stem from different tangencies.
Your terrain shaders are making an assumption: U = x and V = z in world space.
The textures applied to the blended planes do not follow this rule. They are mapped to follow the flow of the plane mesh in order to allow us arbitrarily mapped textures running in all kind of directions (think of farms and swamps seen from above).
So if you try to blend the terrain normals with the plane mesh normals the tangent frames need to be the same to get consistent shading.
Could this be the cause?

 

Unity terrain uses it's own internal uncompressed textures. You can save them for usage for example on mesh. Compressed splatmaps shows artifacts though. If you drag&drop teture on these slots in RTP inspector you don't change the reference but values from textures are copied to the terrain object instead.

I'd need to see some example to better expertise here. Which exact geom blend shader you refer to? Is the issue related to the orientation of planes as you stick them to terrain? Yes, it might be that terrain global normalmaps are not correctly bleneded with geom blend objects. As you said saving scene causes the difference it was a hint that the problem is rather related to some kind of refreshing.

Tom

 

Hi! I have issue when sun intensity drops to zero (it happens in my case when night comes) -- and I instantly have this picture ("SunIntensity0").
Should I tweak something in RTP settings or edit day-night script and set minimum intensity to something very close to zero, but not zero itself? This fix resulted acceptable effect actually ("SunIntensity0001").
And if I understood correctly, I need to put black plane underneath my terrain to get rid of white dots and lines in a ground? (dots above terrain in this picture are stars )

UPD: any light intensity value below 0.001f causes this strange rendering.

 

Props to RTP for good looking snow and wetness.

1. Is it possible to make the snow from Uber and RTP blend together without using the heightmap blending method.
2. Also is it possible to have the snow accumulate slowly on the object. So for example if I use it on the helmet and the head tilts downwards, the snow disappears and when the head tilt up again, the snow doesn't automatically appear but slowly accumulate.

 

I'm using unity version 2017.2.0f1 and getting 4 errors about webplayer is obsolete. Anways to comment out whats not needed in this current unity version.

Assets/ReliefPack/ExampleScenes/ReliefTerrain/_appControlerTerrain.cs(169,21): error CS0619: `UnityEngine.Application.isWebPlayer' is obsolete: `This property is deprecated and will be removed in a future version of Unity, Webplayer support has been removed since Unity 5.4'

Assets/ReliefPack/ExampleScenes/ReliefTerrain/_appControlerTerrain2Geometry.cs(171,21): error CS0619: `UnityEngine.Application.isWebPlayer' is obsolete: `This property is deprecated and will be removed in a future version of Unity, Webplayer support has been removed since Unity 5.4'

 

I have another question. I am using tessellation by height map, and in run time I have strange ghosty terrain overlay. As I understand, this is original terrain geometry somehow renders through. How can I get rid of it?

 

Yes, we shouldn't put the light below some threshold. Rendering pass for terrain is called anyway (I mean with or without directional light it works the same fast/effective).

This can be caused by either shadows - check if you have "full shado pass" turned on in tessellation section of RTP/LOD manager. Or - in forward lioghting mode some post proces effects uses depth&normal info which is correctly generated in deferred.

These warnings are only related to example scenes where I use scripts that have downward compatibility. Checking if we're in webPlayer mode is harmless though.

Your showcase is pretty cool. Unfortunately RTP & UBER use separate snow routines currently. They are similar but are not 100% matching in terms of snow mapping. I'm thinking about providing users with some fully global solution for this where RTP, UBER or 33rd party shaders (after some minor tweaks) can use the same snow everywhere.

The other request for dynamic snow accumulation - it's not trivial to manage. You could try to do it from script side - comparing change in helmet orientation - if it passes some threshold you remove snow and icrease coverage factor slowly. Such feature is not available out of the box.

Tom

 

Right, I had this option turned off. Plus I switched to Deferred -- I hope this problem will go. Thank you for reply!

I wrote editor script that batch-process multiple terrains (assigns ReliefTerrain component from a template and automatically generates and assigns tessellation heightmaps to each terrain (I have 64 -- so it's the only way I can work ). If anyone interested in this piece of code, I can share it here)

 

I would like to express my gratitude to Tomaszek for RTP shader. It's amazing tool makes my composition like real. Just now apply RTP to mesh nearby terrain, and can't see any visual difference between mesh and terrain shaded with same parameters:

Awesome!

 

I don't know why I can't download RTP from asset store anymore!!! do you have any other website I can download it with my download manager?

 

Hi @tomaszek !!

I have downloaded your latest version of RTP and are using it under Unity 5.5.0f3.

At first I think everything works for me, but when I activate the Tessellation / phong feature and then pulse "Recompile shaders ...", at the end of recompiling, my terrain disappears and can not be seen.

Why this problem? I'm under DX11, all textures have normal and height and are 1024.
I have looked in his manual and video tutorial but I have not seen anything to help me.

How can I solve that?.

EDIT: I use deferred mode

regards

 

Check if "Height&normal from texture" is unchecked. Otherwise you have to provide Tessellation height&normal map to Relief Terrain component of your terrain in "Settings->Global maps" section.

 

As Vagrod said above - you need to use provided tool (take a look at tessellation video on YT channel) to make height&normals texture and plug it into the slot under RTP/Settings/Global maps tab

Tom

 

I don't store my packages anywhere. Download user verification is also a bit awkward. Sorry - it's on the Unity side. If you bought it - they must solve the problem.

Tom

 

RTP3 was never that hard to understand and to work with, like lot of people thought or are still thinking in my opinion. Just by seeing one tutorial (POM / Tessalation with Geo Blend Tutorial) you were ready to go. Ofc RTP comes with a lot of options that most of people will never really use for their use case but thats always the case with high functional and feature rich assets.
I personally think that the only Component / Workflow that really made some people jump off the boat or asking for help was the LOD Manager because of following reasons:

• Beginners had too many options which they don't understand specially the different Texture Options (4 or 8 Layers First Pass etc) before seeing any results.
• You need to know exactly what you want to activate and render before you can see some good results. You don't have like 3-5 Profiles which are Preconfigured for you like (4 Textures no Height Features, 4 Textures with POM / Tesselation, 8 Textures no Height Features, 8 Textures with POM / Tesselation) etc. You need to know for example that you need FirstPass 8 Layers when using Deferred, if you want Heightmap features with or without Soft Shadows etc. That's often too much Preconfiguration before beeing able to try something out for the first time or getting the result you want

And ofc lot of people where complaining about the 4 or max 8 Layer restriction.

For me that was never a problem because the Tutorials of Tom explained the most important options of the LOD Manager really well but I understand the people which are irritated at the beginning if they see the LOD Manager.

I am very happy with RTP3. If RTP4 offers Profile Configuration or a faster / smaller LOD Manager that is more easy and faster to handle because of premade Profiles or less configuration specially on the Layer Configuration (just get the number out of my terrain and decide by yourself if its FirstPass etc) I think RTP4 will be pretty awesome. Specially because as Tom said RTP4 will offer more Layers than 8.

@tomaszek
Gonna be very interested in Beta testing, if you will do something like that. As happy UBER and RTP customer and RTP Tutorial Maker I would really enjoy to help or give feedback, if this is planed.

Looking forward for more information in the future.
Cheers
Ronny

 

@tomaszek Have you seen this artifact before? The circle and crosses on the texture, they appear to be related to the UV blending multiplier and perlin normal tiling scale.

 

... at least I know now where did crop circles come from...)

 

Uh, no faintest idea. Such artifact looks like something already present in a texture you mix with UV blending. Without exact project I can't reproduce the issue.

Tom

 

I understand. It's not a critical issue at this time. I will try and get something to you soon.

 

Could it just be the shader did not compile right; the combination of options are not supported.

 

I'd really have to check it again on my work machine because I'm unable to replicate the issue on a different computer(?) I can say confidently, however, that the 'bulllseye' feature - which is not present in any of my terrain textures - absolutely changes tiling when I adjust the parameters mentioned above.

EDIT: could be related to SpeedTree... somehow

 

I am not sure that this question is directly related to RTP, but I'll try)
I've just started experimenting with caves, and everything is great -- except this. I have cave model (I used Blender) and I UV-Unwrapped it. After I imported my model into Unity, I noticed that every unwrapped set of polygons has different shading. Is this how Unity works? Or maybe I am doing something wrong in unwrapping process? Normals are correct: this shading pattern changes only with UV-Unwrap change in source model. If I change tiling, this pattern stays.
(Texture is black with small gray dots. It's seamless, without any color and brightness variations)

 

What is your lighting setup, baked or realtime, or mixed?

 

Mixed. I tried to make this cave object static and bake, I tried non-static -- no changes at all.
If I won't solve this problem, I'll try different approach: I will be making caves from stones. If I'll use LODs and dynamic culling, this could work. This will work better with streaming, I can than even make really big caves, not 65K-limited by Unity. But of course single-object cave is easier.

 

Having not seen the project, I can only guess, but it's clearly a UV issue and likely related to the lighting setup. Could be flipped UVs, could be not enough texel density, make sure Shadowmask or Distance Shadowmask is enabled in settings, of course, make sure your lights are set to the appropriate type to fit your lighting configuration. Looks like some padding issues on the entrance to the cave where there is some extruded geometry that is catching lighting information on the inside face of the cave that should otherwise be dark.

 

Thank you, I'll check it!

UDP: Looks like mesh I used was messed up. Its normal-origins in some places were detached from polygons and were floating in mid-air. I'll look closely tomorrow, but I think that was the case.

UPD2: Just change your normal texture type to Normal. That's that simple

 

Hey Tom,
I am working with Vegetation Studio Beta a really awesome tool to draw vegetation like trees, grasses, plants etc on the terrain. Right now it's in beta and as RTP user I am trying to give my input for it using RTP as Terrain Shader.
When using Vegetation on a tesselated terrain (using your terrain heightmap etc) we got the problem that the vegetation is not spawned "on" the terrain because it does not find the new tesselated height. Its spawned slightly above.



So the question would be if you have a c# function to calculate the new tessellated height. Ideally it should be thread safe, but it does not have to be. So the author could try to fix that and give support for RTP.

Best regards
Ronny

 

That's the classical problem of floating objects using RTP tessellation. But you don't need to use the same terrain height data for drawing terrain and vegetation (they can be turned on/off for rendering separately in terrain settings). Follow my YT tessellation video. As you have hi-res height data in terrain, you can still use high pixel error (to simplify source mesh for tessellation refinement) while having detailed collider which is base for terrain API that gives hight data for vegetation placement. After you switch to tessellation - it will be always different form what is used as collider data, but you can use "Get heights" button in RTP to match collider heights as close as possible to terrain. You can find in how do I follow the height formulas used in my scripts to match what is produced by shader (which displaces vertices dynamically).

It's not difficult to find - in debugger you can simply catch breakpoint where I have actions for "Get heights" button and setp until you jump into function that calculates heights and apply them to back from Height&Normals texture to terrain data.

Tom

 

Shameless plug, but it's related to terrain and users can do a great deal. I've just noticed Nat decided to put Terrain Composer 2 %50 off temporarily (WorldComposer as well). You can consider picking it since it's so cheap now...

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/7065

ATB, Tom

 

Hi Tom, I am on the latest version of Unity and just imported RTP 3.3. Could you tell me why my textures aren't showing after attaching the script to my terrain? Everything is white. Thank you.

 

Try attaching light direction script to the main directional light in your scene. Look at my example scene to check if it works after RTP installation. You can find the script attached to light there (applyLightforDeferred). If you're in deferred it's necessary step.

Tom

 

After several months of using RTP, I just remembered to thank you for the amazing asset. It's really cool how quickly you can achieve amazing results with RTP, which would be impossible with Unity Terrain on its own.
This doesn't even showcase all of rtp's possibilties, but after taking the screenshot I was so happy with the result, I just needed to say thank you for the asset!