Relief Terrain Pack (RTP) v3 on AssetStore

Hello again Tom! As always I feel that I should thank you for such an amazing asset!

We seem to be having an issue with the projectors in our game not behaving correctly with tessellation enabled.



Currently we are using tessellation with "height&normal from texture" enabled. We've narrowed it down to this feature.

On the surface (pun intended) it appears that the projector is drawing on the actual terrain data and when RTP draws the terrain using the normal map texture it sometimes displays above the actual terrain (expected behavior).

If that is in fact what is occurring, or if you believe something else is occurring, would you happen to have any idea as to how to make the projector work with tessellation enabled?

Also, please note that the terrain pictured is purposefully bumpy. It doesn't occur on flat terrain, so we noticed it on ramps and the edges of cliffs the worst.

 

Projectors use separate shaders. They are fed with terrain mesh by Unity, but projector shaders themselves don't tessellate the mesh. That's the issue. You would need projector shader that exactly follows RTP tessellation. So - it would require extracting tessellation functionality and adding it to proj. shaders.

Tom

 

That sounds like an advanced process! I've only basic shader knowledge, but could you point me in the right direction when it comes to extracting the tessellation data from RTP? Once I have access to that it should (hopefully) be easy enough to plug that into the projector shaders.

Thanks!

 

It's not about extracting data, it's about extracting tessellation functionality from RTP code (vertex with tessellation functions) that displaces the terrain and brings it to projector shader. You could use Unity's "show generated code" which will show you actual shader code. Look for shadow caser maybe as we don't need anything more than displacing terrain. You're interested in pass marked SHADOW_CASTER. Beware it will look "complex" (will show you a lot of code that will be compiled out anyway). What we actuall'y need is part of vertex function with its tessellation companion (hull, domain functions). You'd need to port this functionality to projector shader.

And yes - the process is far beyond "non shader coder artist level". There are other ways to project onto any surfaces - in deferred lighting path. Look at deferred projected decals on UAS. Might be a lot easier for you to apply.

Tom

 

Hi Tom, sorry for always asking you on something, just wanna fix it at best and you might know where aproximately i can find answer in your code. Now I am solving a weird blur, if you look on terrain under certain angle as in first screen

but when I look from for example top (under closer to 90 degrees) it looks fine even from far distance as in screen 2 it looks sharp. I know you can have a grass (and I have) but some players turn off grass for performance and then it looks quite ugly. And still very visible in distance after grass ends. (I am not sure if second image display right so there is a link - https://ctrlv.cz/shots/2017/12/17/KwOO.png)


Any Idea where in your base shader can find something that could affect view angle? Thanks. Anyway, i solved few things if you would like to get my shader back, but I am afraid I am not writing it so nice as you... just trying to get a nice result. Thank you much for your time

 

It's aniso filtering that's missing when we use atlasing. For combined normals you can increase it (RTP/combined textures/conbined normals) in texture settings (after saving in import settings). For color atlases we don't have aniso. You'd need to go for 4+4 mode (if you need 8 layers). This holds you back from drawing terrain in deferred (shouldn't be an issue if you use one directional light and don't need deferred projected decals). You can force terrain to be lit in forward using "no deferred" option in RTP LOD manager.

Tom

 

Hey, Tom

Thanks for great Shader, but I get an error everytime I start Unity.



for this shader


I am using Unity2017.3 Now.

Is that a bug in 2017.3？

 

This is wrong thread. Please, post it on UBER one.

 

Hi, we've upgraded from 5.6 to 2017.3 and now the ground is black and white.


(Mostly white, but there's some slight texture variation of you get close. It's not just a pure-white surface.)

The first time I recompiled the RTP shaders, they were fixed again for a minute... but as soon as I pressed Play, they're black and white again. I couldn't make it come back again after that.

I've tried reimporting every shader, and in fact reimporting literally everything in the project (which takes 8+ hours, it's a large project). If there's an asset discrepancy, I can't find it.

Can you give a hint about what's going wrong? It seems to be something that the RTP_LODmanager is doing, maybe? I dunno.

We're using the latest version of RTP in the asset store. (We were a few minor versions behind, but it looks the same in both versions tried.)

Edit: I had color come back a few times after that. As soon as I click on any camera in the hierarchy, the terrain goes white.

 

Make sure you've got light direction script attached to main directional light (and no light goes below 0.01 with intensity). Compare to my example scene and main directional light. It might cure it (if that's the problem I suspect). Let me know.

Tom

 

Hello!
-Is there a way to just, simply tessellate & displace by user selected
textures from RTP main layer somehow? (without preparing Height Normal
Texture)
-My reason is because im proceding very long terrain (in Map
Magic) my hands are lite tight in this.

 

I do, but it doesn't help. I've stripped literally everything out of the scene except the terrain, the light, and the _RTP_LODmanager and it's still broken. I've downgraded to 2017.2 but it still happens there, too. The assets are unchanged, everything else looks good, but the terrains are basically white. Occasionally the ground fixes itself in the editor, but as soon as I hit play it's white again. (Regardless of whatever else is in the scene, if anything.)

I figured it might be some other add-on causing trouble, so I made a new project, imported one of the bugged scenes, and then removed every unrelated asset. But the terrain is still white. I'm out of ideas on what else to try.

Do you have any other suggestions of where to look?

 

I understand you'd like to automate the height&nomals texture generation? The code for this is available in this tool script SampleTerrainHeightmap2Texture.cs You can get the functionality and call within your automation solution.

Check without any postFX. If terrain shader throws NaNs (instead of valid color) in HDR the output would be black. Have you played with LOD manager settings? Maybe some specific combination of features makes shader goes bonkers. Is it forward or deferred used? Please give me LOD manager configuration (how many detail layers do you use?).

Tom

 

I use 8 layers, and no LOD manager settings seem to affect it. (In the screenshots below I'm testing with no special features in the LOD manager except "8 layers in first pass", using "Simple" LOD level. But I've tried many 8-layer-mode settings with same effect.)

I've removed all post-processing, and now have deleted all the non-RTP scripts and shaders from the project (a backup project, of course). I exported the remaining scene assets into a .unitypackage and then imported it into a new project to make sure there wasn't any weirdness left over. Then I wiped out the ReliefPack folder and imported it fresh from the asset store. Still the same.

One useful thing: I've finally figured out what makes the terrain "come back": reimporting any of the ground textures causes the terrain to be fixed briefly:



While it is in this state, I can edit the terrain, paint down textures, place trees, etc., like normal.

When I click Play, or sometimes just when I click on the camera in the hierarchy, the terrain changes:



Once the terrain changes like this, it's permanent, both in the editor and in play mode, until I re-import another ground texture. (Reimporting the RTP folder does NOT help in this case, only reimporting the actual ground textures.)

Other things that might be important:
- The camera in this test was made by choosing "Camera" from the GameObject menu. It's exactly stock camera, and is the only camera in the scene. It does have HDR checked, since it's checked by default (and we do need HDR).
- We use Linear color space and deferred rendering, but changing these doesn't seem to help

--

... and just now, as I was writing up this post, I stopped being able to make it "come back" by reimporting a texture. It's staying this way whatever I do now.

The terrain is now in a state where I can see some of the ground textures, but very washed out. This has happened a few times during testing, but other times it's basically just white ground. Here I've turned off the grass and trees on the terrain:

 

Now I can see that shader doesn't throw Nans, it's rather matter of detail atlas textures getting void most probably. Can you check in Combined textures/atlases tab? Shader need them. After you reimport texture (or reattach/refresh texture for a layer) atlas is created. It's scene object which can under some circumstances miss reference. After you rebuild atlases and have all textures intact make sure you saved all combined textures (atlases, combined normals and combined heightmaps). This should help. Saved textures are regular assets and not volatile scene objects. They can be reused between terrain objects, stored in prefabs, shared across scenes, etc.

Tom

 

I do use baked atlas files in the regular project (because otherwise saving the scene takes a very long time!). I just tried re-generating all the baked files, but it's still the same. Is there some other place where the shader references the textures, that might have gotten mixed up?

I had it create an entirely new asset in case the import settings were somehow screwed up on the old atlases. This is one of the new ones, does it look right?



I've also tried using different textures so that we get entirely different-looking atlas textures. The ground does change appropriately (if you look close enough), but it's still extremely saturated with white.

 

Are you in deferred rendering path? Might be something screwed at lighting terrain stage. You can actually see what shader outputs in scene debug view for deferred (separate buffers - diffuse, gloss, specularity, normals). How buffers do look like when it's in "screwed state"?

Tom

 

Yep, using deferred. Do you mean the scene view modes? I don't have a lot of experience using them so I'm not sure what they "should" look like. But here they are!

First, regular "shaded" view (the gray ground here should be greenish):



Deferred albedo:



Deferred specular:



Deferred smoothness:



Deferred normals:



Also, I just tried the checkbox in _RTP_LODManager called "No deferred", which didn't change anything in regular view, it still looks like the first picture above. (In the deferred views it's all black now, which makes sense because it's forward rendering in that mode.)

 

Shader outputs overbrighten value somehow.for albedo. Which is pretty weird. I've never been reported on such issue. But such thing can be actually reproduced using master brightness/saturation slider (RTP/Settings/main) or brightness/saturation setting per layer. Could you check it? Because now it looks very strange to me. If you can afford making simple project (no models, only terrain with simple set of textures) where I could reproduce the problem and expose it to me (contacting me via private forum message) I can give it a try.

Tom

 

Hi everyone,

I have a newbie question/problem I think. I tried to find a similar question or answer a few pages back but failed. Hopefully there's an easy answer.

I create a polygon mesh and use the material ReliefTerrainVertexBlendTriPlanar in RTP 3.3j with 2017.2 but it's been the same for quite a few versions. When the mesh hits a certain degree (I think 45 degrees) the texture becomes blurred which looks bad.
In the first image here is maybe 40 degrees and the second image I changed it to I think 45 and the texture suddenly becomes blurred. Any thoughts?


Non-blurred. The mesh behind the head slopes less than 45 degrees away from the head into the image.


If I increase the slope to 45 degrees the texture becomes blurred. Any ideas why?

Cheers!

 

Most probably due to lack of aniso filtering. It's fully handled in 4 layers mode only (or 4+4). In 8 layers mode we have obligatory diffuse color atlas that's not sampled using aniso. Simply make sure textures that are used by RTP shader have enough aniso set (normals - look at RTP/Combined texture/normals). Diffuse color - they are input color textures you use on layers.

Tom

 

Hello, Tomasz.
I Hope my question is not very impolite. Could we please get some news about RTP4? Are you going to release it soon?

 

The question is emotionally neutral, still sensible. I must be honest - as I'm burried with work on D.R.O.N.E. I can't promise RTP4 to be released soon, but of course I'll report any plans as soons they take real shape.

Tom

 

Thak you for an update! Buy the way, I bet RTP is going to benefit from Scriptable Render Pipeline, so it make sence to wait for a while and use it, right? Amazing job with D.R.O.N.E.!

 

Yep, SRPs are something that don't let me stay calm . It's great technology, but makes a lot of headaches for shader providers (to reimplement everything for SRP HD).

Tom

 

Not mentioning custom user defined pipelines, honestly I can't imagine how are you going to deal with it.

 

Super thank you, will do!

 

As custom SRPs are something for experienced developers I think that shipping kind of .cginc libraries along with shader products like RTP or UBER would be the most reasonable solution.

It might be not bad thing in the end because forces publishers to develop more clean and modular way (and reduce hardcoding things as much as possible).

Tom

 

Hi, I have a problem. When I rotate the directional light in the Y coordinates, the ground becomes dark depending on the direction of the light source. The angle of inclination remains unchanged, but the direction of light changes, for example, from west to east. In another project, the whole terrain becomes just black. I put the video with testing in a clean project with standard textures from your asset.

 

Might be problem of sRGB biased normalmaps. After you save 2 pairs of detil normapmaps created (check if it's done corretly) - in RTP/Combined textures/normalmaps make sure sRGB is unchecked. The same for speciual combined texture (combined perlin normals). In newest RTP version installed under U2017.3.0f3 it should work fine (sRGB should be set correctly by default).

Tomek

 

Hey Tom! Am looking for solutions in regard to the Unity terrain; I've recently found your asset, could you please help me understand its capabilities in relation to certain matters?
1. If I am to be using the Substances as a feed, will RTP recognize the roughness map? I.e. If I have a stone and a puddle together in a single Substance/material will it correctly recognize that the puddle must be wet and glossy while the stone is not, OR will it apply a universal value for a given material like the standard Unity shader does? (The same question goes for the metallic, basically)
2. If I am to be feeding the RTP the standard texture maps (I.e. Albedo, Normal, etc; not the whole Substance) is there a way to feed to it the Roughness/Metallic maps in any shape or form?
3. Does RTP works along with the Alloy shaders pack? (by which I mean: Alloy asks to change the Built-in Deferred and Deferred Reflections Shaders to that of the Alloy's ones in the Project settings. Do I need to change that back or RTP don't mind that?)

 

1. Substances are recognized by RTP, but in "static" form i.e. RTP should be able to grab substance textures (albedo, normals, heights, smoothness/roughness) and pack them into used by RTP shader. It's done via single click. I've been reported about sometimes substances have problems with output (alked over and over on other threads) and developer needs to do it "manually" - save substance output as texture using built-in Unity functionality and use them as RTP input. Rougness map is inverted smoothnes map (which RTP uses). You can use it changing ranges low-hi ranges right in RTP which will automaticaly interpret smoothenss to roughness

2. You feed RTP with 3 textures per layer - albedo(RGB) with smoothnes (A), normalmap, heightmap (for parallax efects, wet effects and blending). If your textures consists of puddles - fine, but I'd not recommend it because the same puddle will be copied all over the terrain that layer covers which gives obvious patterns. It's better to use dry substances and paint puddles with RTP wetness functionality which in addition will give you optional flowing animated water effect and animated rain droplets effect on the wet areas. So y ou can simply "paint" where would you like the puddles to be.

RTP uses metallic workflow with constant metalness value. There so no separate specular or metalic map. For water that's fine - it's dielectric material anyway.

3. RTP should be able to work with Alloy. As far as I'm aware Alloy has deferred/reflections shaders that handle RTP properties as well. Basically you can use Alloy's deferred lighting shaders along with RTP as long as you don't need POM self-shadowing.

Tom

 

Thank you for the in-depth explanation Tom! Crystal clear, much appreciated.
P.s. And apparently I was wrong that the inverted-roughness/smoothness is applied in a universal value per material in the standard shader; I should have double-checked the pre-set Substance Unity export settings: the thing just wasn't in the alpha, hence the problem. Oh well. Either way, thank you for the reply again!

 

I've just resubmitted RTP3.3 (replaced 2 .js files from example scene with c# equivalents).

The good news is that I've decided to set it on very attractive price - $40 (not sure for how long).

I keep crossgrade price UBER 2 RTP for as low as $15 now ! Both products are $65. Buy UBER for $50, grab RTP for $15. Or buy RTP for $40 and grab UBER for $25.

Tom

 

Hi, how would this be achieved? Via a particle system?

 

no via a scrolling / distorted texture

 

Cool, could be achieved via particle effect too I'm quite certain, maybe less efficient? Seems like a tessellation thing too maybe?

 

When we use RTP and UBER together which build-in shader should we place in graphic section? (Internal-DeferredShading_UBER) or (Internal-DeferredShading_RTP)? Cause I can see difference on my terrain when I switch between these two.

 

UBER one I'd say - RTP does not handle translucency like UBER does.

 

@tomaszek ,

Any plans to write an extension for Gaia for this product?

 

Actually we don't need any extension. You create Unity terrain (using any tool including Gaia) then apply RTP component which makes this terrain to be rendered suing RTP shader. As far as I remember Gaia handles one terrain object (maybe it's changed). RTP vs. 3rd party terrain management tool is welcome as soon as we need to manage "a lot of" terrains. This is case of Terrain Composer where you can split your environment into several terrains and TC can apply right global maps (global normals, color) to each terrain chunk automatically.

Tom

 

Hey Tom,

Any word on why RTP was suddenly switched to "depreciated" status in the Asset Store?

 

I'd like to know it myself. Uploaded package with javascript files replaced with c# and did it 3 weeks ago... I need to request it then. Good you pointed this out... (!)

 

oh ok so this is a mistake (the depricated) I was freaking out since I just recently purchased this haha.

 

Hi Tom,

We have been profiling our game, we have RTP set to 8-layers mode, but it seems like the terrain is drawing add passes in deferred mode (see picture below). Any ideas on what we should look at? Thanks, -H

 

At moment of developing RTP I wasn't able to use better "work around Unity terrain engine" than allowing addpass but with (vertex) pass selected together with colormask 0. It does not write anything to camera target buffer and shader variant is dummy itself. Still some drawc alls are issued which I couldn't get rid of because it's Unity that controls mesh/drawing. It is not supposed to introduce any considerable overhead (these DCs are already processed for culling when drawing terrain in deferred).

Tom

 

How to solve this problem? Settings have not changed. (early were configured as needed and everything worked.) I downloaded a new version of the version of the asset. many parameters do not change in the editor! The background is black. There is an error in the editor.

 

Hello Tom,

I'm trying to figure out why loading a terrain scene from an Assetbundle is breaking my terrain. When I load the scene with SceneManager.LoadSceneAsync() everything appears to load correctly. However when I pack it into an Assetbundle and load the same scene the terrain appears to lose some textures. The Global, Combined, and Detail textures are still there but the Bump and Height textures are missing which is causing this error:

Code (CSharp):

1. IndexOutOfRangeException: Array index is out of range.
2. ReliefTerrain.GetSplatsFromGlobalSettingsHolder () (at Assets/ReliefPack/Scripts/ReliefTerrain/ReliefTerrain.cs:173)
3. ReliefTerrain.GetGlobalSettingsHolder () (at Assets/ReliefPack/Scripts/ReliefTerrain/ReliefTerrain.cs:98)
4. ReliefTerrain.RefreshTextures (UnityEngine.Material mat, Boolean check_weak_references) (at Assets/ReliefPack/Scripts/ReliefTerrain/ReliefTerrain.cs:244)
5. ReliefTerrain.Awake () (at Assets/ReliefPack/Scripts/ReliefTerrain/ReliefTerrain.cs:199)

 

Evening all, I'm looking for tips/advice on getting a wet shoreline effect. From the docs it seems getting dry sections is easy enough with the mask but getting wet edges to water I cant find a solution. I can't do the obvious of drying all terrain and just wet painting the shoreline and having wet const at one because this would stop my weather effects on the rest of the terrain when it is raining.

What I want is height based wet area really if this is possible which i could alter flow direction in code to get a shoreline moving in and out feel.

 

Hello,

I am a beginner with RTP so please bear with me if the answer to my question is obvious.

I played with terrain tessellation as demonstrated in one of your YT videos. I like the results I get with some good quality detail textures. Now I am trying the same thing with a terrain mesh but I get strange results.

Before converting the terrain to a mesh with the conversion tool in RTP, I adjusted the heightmap heights to be able to paint some cavities in my terrain. Then I prepared the HeightNormal texture for tessellation as it has to be done with a terrain, not a mesh. Now after conversion I apply the RTP engine to the mesh with the same settings I used on the terrain. Unfortunately I see two "terrains" in the editor instead of one - one is a wireframe of the mesh, the other one seems to be the rendered, flat surface (but its black). This black plane hovers hundreds of meters above the wireframe. Is this related to my previous heightmap adjustment? Am I doing something wrong, or does this tessellation not work on a converted mesh?

Edit: I can't append a screenshot. When trying to save my post, I get an error message telling me that my content is spam-like. What the...