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Relief Terrain Pack (RTP) v3 on AssetStore

Discussion in 'Assets and Asset Store' started by tomaszek, Oct 22, 2013.

  1. sixto1972

    sixto1972

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    Does anyone have a way to take a separate piece of geometry like say a grid... and conform it to a terrain? So that you could then texture that and use geometry blending shader? So you can make a cliff face with a detailed texture and it is applied to the overlapping grid geo, and then uses the geometry blending shader to blend it?
     
  2. bluemoon

    bluemoon

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    Check out the sticked mesh in the documentaion that came with RTP
     
    Last edited: Mar 4, 2014
  3. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    Bluemoon gave a good clue, the only thing for concern is when you paint triangles on cliffs they are the same stretched as on terrain (but this way they fit to the underlying terrain) - you need to export such painted mesh and unwrap it in 3rd party modeling software to unstrech uv mapping. Another thing - you can stick geometries along normal, so when you turn a plane so this is parallel to the cliff you can stick it in such direction - however you might need to set higher offset to overcome z-fight (in modeling software you can push it out of terrain surface, too and make kind of overhang)

    Tom
     
  4. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    What you see is that distant part of terrain doesn't use RTP shader, but default basemap shader (diffuse 1 texture layer). RTP takes care about this depending on wheter you use materials or not.

    1. When using materials basemap distance in unity terrain settings should be small because we use special case shader there - cheaper than short distance

    2. When not using materials basemap distance should be set to the value exceeding viewing distance.

    And RTP should set it to the proper value (in Unity's inspector its limited to 2000, but via script can be set to any value). In your case probably something interferes with RTP and sets basemap distance closer.

    Tom
     
  5. kaamos

    kaamos

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    Thanks for the prompt reply. I'm using Terrain Composer so I suppose that is what is overriding the basemap distance. What would be the best way to prevent this?
     
  6. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    Frankly, I (still...) don't know much TC. I believe there is a script somewhere attached to terrain which sets this. Maybe you could refer to some TC docs ?

    Tom
     
  7. Unityaware

    Unityaware

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    Hi Tom, I just found this of yours: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPTuAcAmc0k
    I need to do a realistic river. Is this something you provide? And how would you do it. I tried Easy Road to create a river, but it crashes or hangs when initializing. Could this be a clash with RTP
     
  8. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    This is provided with RTP3, but simulates water on the surface, so - rivers - might be not good idea, but only shallow streams. Have you tried Flow ? You might probably blend something like this with my shallow water at the edges.

    Tom
     
    Last edited: Mar 5, 2014
  9. botumys

    botumys

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    Hi, I'm testing the beta , and it's great! Lightmaps are working well, new settings are very usefull (I like the diffuse scattering for grass). Far replace slider is perfect to use with big rocks surfaces!
    I'm now testing holes and water.

    Here a preview of my new zone :
     

    Attached Files:

    • $set.jpg
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    Last edited: Mar 5, 2014
  10. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    Wow :). But what could be expected from Botumys ? I'll try to present "hole" today (a cave with two holes as entrances in example scene terrain). BTW - I'm thinking about 8layers mode that work in triplanar (PM only). Since with "hard crosspass" it's pretty simple now to achieve (atlasing for triplanar has been introduced already), I'm wondering how to resolve this with blending areas (w/o hard crosspass). If blend occurs only on flats that wouldn't be much distractive, but on slopes we'd have discontinuities.

    I'm talking about 8layers triplanar (only for layers 0-3) because deferred makes it problematic to control gloss for addpass. In 8 layers mode (I know you use triplanar alot) deferred you could benefit both - triplanar and full control over gloss for all layers.

    Tom
     
  11. lazygunn

    lazygunn

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    That is lovely! Fast too, lovely work. There seems to be a lot going on with the lighting to give a really realistic but artily deft sense of illumination

    As a quick question, where did you get your trees? Or are they your own creation? Theyre exactly what i've been looking for, they look amazing, but it's ok if you don't want to/can't share the source
     
  12. botumys

    botumys

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    Thanks :)
    About holes, Does shadow pass through terrain where holes are painted?
    It' true, I confess that I'm a big fan of triplanar mapping :)
    For water specular, do you have advices for me, I can't tweak spec correctly.

    No problem, this one is from nature pack from Michael O : https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/1021/
    I bought a lot of assets from this guy, he is the best!
     
  13. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    I've just fixed some shadow pass issues yesterday. beta2 might work weird with this, but it's fixd now (I hope). To answer your question - yes final releasem will handle shadows thru holes correctly 9that's my plan :) )

    Water - check:
    1. is your water visible or not (only wet) - they got independent gloss/spec boost sliders. To make water more glossy just
    2. remember that glossiness on addpass in deferred is problematic (move wet layers to first pass) - you can set constant glossiness for addpass deferredin settings main. Per layer you need to take care about last slider in PBl section (in addpass deferred)
    3. much emissive fuilds are not glossy

    Tom
     
  14. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    A few screenshots of terrain pierced and filled with geom blend geometry for cave tunel inside terrain hill.






     
    Last edited: Mar 5, 2014
  15. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    And a short video:



    ATB, Tom
     
    Last edited: Mar 5, 2014
  16. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    I managed to enable triplanar in 8 layers mode. To get best performance you might enable "no overlap in 8 layers mode". Although crosspass (0-3 vs 4-7) layers might look sharp depending on textures used you won't see any discontinuity. If you decide to make it soft you won't see any problems, too unless you will blend triplanar layers (0-3) with layers 4-7 on steep slopes. But even then I barely saw where edge was - only when I went really close. This might be more distinct when blended on very steep cliff.

    This seems to be good addition for people that use PM (still no POM + triplanar) and deferred - 8 layers in one pass makes it not only faster but better in terms of layers 4-7 gloss. Should be best configuration for people using triplanar and 8 layers setup.

    ATB, Tom

    P.S. Tomorrow I'll test it further and will try to manage new features (PBL+new water/emissive functions, maybe IBL spec/reflection, too) on geom blend and bonus shaders. When I finish this I'll submit RTP3.1 for AssetStore.
     
    Last edited: Mar 5, 2014
  17. Deleted User

    Deleted User

    Guest

    I need that hole feature!

    looks GREAT!!!
     
  18. laurent-clave

    laurent-clave

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    Thank you for your work!
    Hole it's great and it will be much helpful in my project: D
     
  19. rahul007

    rahul007

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    Hi tomasz!! I havent taken a look at rtp for at least 2-3 months( i have been busy modelling and looking for good water solutions) and you have made an evolution. Terrain holes system. WOW! Could you put me up to date about features of rtp 3.1? :D
     
    Last edited: Mar 6, 2014
  20. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    Sure - visit last 15 pages to get it :D
    Seriously - the list is too long to write here (better make it later when I submit package)

    Tom
     
  21. rahul007

    rahul007

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    When will you submit it? If your answer is 2-3 days then just give a list of top 5 main features.:D
     
  22. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    OK, shortlist

    - physically based shading with IBL integration
    - holes
    - new standalone shader (voxel, any mesh, planets)
    - new blending features
    - advanced colormap mixing
    + dozens of other improvements and bug fixes

    Tom
     
  23. rahul007

    rahul007

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    So is it beta 2 currently.I will email you tomorrow.That's quite a lot of features!!And btw is that island demo still alive?
     
  24. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    We've interrupted work on island demo. Hopefully resume this soon.

    Tom
     
  25. Dustin-Horne

    Dustin-Horne

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    Can't wait to see this update hit the Asset store. ;) I've been playing around with RTP 3 in conjunction with Terrain Composer and it's pretty awesome already.
     
  26. ryno_coder

    ryno_coder

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    Hello Tom,

    I came across an issue with my textures on my terrain - there are patches on the terrain that appear dark and blocky. As I get closer to these patches, they get bigger. I'm using RTP3 and Terrain Composer. I don't see this happening when I'm not using RTP3. I'll keep looking at the RTP3 documentation, maybe I didn't setup _RTP_LODmanager correctly. Also, I'm using 8 layers. Please see attached images for what I'm trying to explain. Do you know what I could've done wrong that would be causing this to happen?

    $TerrainError_1.jpg $TerrainError_2.jpg
     
  27. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    Looks like either one of the textures used makes problems (its heigtmap probably) or something's wrong with areas where layers blend. This way or another - makes no sense trying to find the exact reason as incoming RTP3.1 redefines a whole part of blending code in shader so I believe this will not be present when you update your project to the new version. As I said this is my priority to submit 3.1 ASAP.

    Tom
     
  28. rockvider83

    rockvider83

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    Hello Tom,

    Relief Terrain Pack v3.1 feature list looks great, But I would like to ask some questions about the triplannar shaders before making the purchase:

    1- How many textures can be blended together?
    2- How is the blending controlled?
    3- What RTP features are supported on it?
    4- Does it use PBL too?

    We have built a voxel terrain system and would like to use RTP with it.

    Mostafa
     
  29. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    RTP3.1 + voxel terrains is now very successful mariage :). We've got no restrictions or requirements on mesh used. Basically you can get results with very simple mesh where only normals are defined (no uv, tangents which are calculated inside shader for triplanar, nor vertex colors are necessary to make it working).

    1. 4 layers (+snow as "virtual 5th layer). New shader allows to use geom blend on it (works fine for moderately steep surfaces), so - if you consider making terrain not dynamically, you can decorate it with more "virtual layers" (sticked meshes)

    2. blending - either vertex colors or via normals - configurable (like flats - 1st layers, sides / cliffs - 2nd layers, etc.). So - you don't need to define anything and variation on texturing will appear automatically (via world/local normals). Additionaly - you can use 2-4 layers. With less than 4 layers you've got 1 or 2 vertex color channels free (BA) for snow/water coverage control and for optional AO control (good to darken cavern interiors w/o necessity to self shadow it with realtime shadows)

    3. almost all RTP features are now supported that are available in triplanar (no POM nor aniso, 4 layers only)

    4. PBL - yes

    Should satisfy most users that like to use RTP power on ANY mesh (esp. these voxel ones).
    A (small) drawback - you need to configure shader features used by hand in shader code - commenting/uncommenting feature #defines and property blocks (so you don't see properties of features disabled in shader to not get confused). No such thing like "LOD manager" for voxel terrain shading solution. This is the same as in RTP3, but I've sorted out new shader code the way configuration is simplier and more logical.

    ATB, Tom
     
    Last edited: Mar 8, 2014
  30. Robsy128

    Robsy128

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    Hi Tom,

    Great tool so far :D

    Is it possible to make a waterfall with this kit, though? I noticed you have streams working in your example project, but what about larger areas of water? For example, I want to get this river mesh moving naturally:

    $Waterfall.JPG

    Any tips?
     
  31. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    You can make as large area of flowing water as you wish, but my tool and shaders are rather oriented to make shallow water, streams on the surface. For deep water with turbulent (waterfall - particles needed) flow you probably need to look around to get other tools. Anyway - you can paint mesh using geom blend script (use any mesh, apply geom blend, stick it, remove tris and paint shape of stream manually downhill). Then use one of my water shaders (like one of theese used on example scenes.

    Tom
     
  32. topofsteel

    topofsteel

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    Kind of an odd request. I've been using RTP casually for some time. I typically do buildings, so I haven't had the time to really generate any high quality work/examples. I'm going to be giving a demo to some people and wanted to show what was possible with Unity/RTP. Does anyone have a standalone player with some basic controls they wouldn't mind letting me use. Or a Oculus Rift build would be even better. It's fine if it has your watermark or whatever, i'm not trying to claim it's my work. It doesn't hurt to ask, thanks.
     
  33. ilookha

    ilookha

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  34. ilookha

    ilookha

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    Hi Tom,

    I'm getting a consistent issue: atlases are saved with offsets in 8 layers mode. Steps to reproduce:
    1. Set up an 8-layer terrain with POM shading.
    2. Press "Prepare atlases from detail textures" to generate atlases.
    3. Observe correctly rendered terrain.
    4. Store atlas textures as .png files and save the scene.
    5. Restart Unity and reopen the scene.
    6. Observe incorrect parallax rendering: diffuse textures being offset against the height/normal textures.
    7. Press "Prepare atlases from detail textures" to regenerate atlases.
    8. Observe correctly rendered terrain again.

    This probably has something to do with PadTex and BlendMip. PadTex seems to apply some padding which roughly corresponds to the visible offset, while BlendMip manipulates mip levels and this mip customization is probably discarded when we store a PNG texture.

    Could you tell if this issue still exists in RTP 3.1? If it does, do you know a workaround?

    We really need to store the atlases since we're using multi-scene tiled terrain with asset bundles.

    Terrain screenshots:
    $rtp_atlas_normal.png
    $rtp_atlas_offset.png
     
    Last edited: Mar 10, 2014
  35. sebas77

    sebas77

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    I am interested in finding an alternative to the Unity terrain engine. However I am not sure if this one just make the unity terrain engine visually better or it is totally a new terrain engine.

    I am not really interested in visual effect as I am interested in performance. Can you shed some light on it?
     
  36. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    RTP doesn't replace terrain engine but renders terrain more plausible way. RTP shaders can handle many options, so they can be used on terrains, meshes, voxel terrains, even planets, but I don't construct meshes for this - it's up to user. RTP can't be considered as fastest solution, but visually most advanced. Thus - if you don't care about visual effect, but performance you need to look further.

    ATB, Tom
     
  37. knotFF

    knotFF

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    Tom.
    Everytime I use RTP I keep getting 2 results that I am not really sure why it's happening, so I decided to post there.

    The first thing is a little message that says (under Settings>Main): "For performance reasons shader uses the same tiling for every detail map", which of course means I cannot reduce the tiling size for close up detail and enlarge for far distance and so on. Is it something to with openGL (I am using OSX)?

    The other thing is that no matter what material I place I keep getting very specular materials. See image below.
    $RTP_Specular.jpg
    $RTP_Specular.jpg
    Thanks.
     
  38. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    Tiling message is what it says - you can not use independent UV tiling for every layer, but all layers share the same UV tiling size. You can, however, adjust independently, UV blend tiling factors for every layer, so at far distance you can decide what will be the size of blended texture for every layer separately. This will be even more important for new RTp3.1 feature - UV blend replacement which at far distance can just replace close texture with larger one to prevent patterns across terrain.

    As for specularity - there are many reasons you get it. In RTP3.0 you should use alpha channel for your detail textures (RGB DXT1 packed textures are full glossy). Shininess can be adjusted per layer. General specular color in set in Settings Main. Just refer to docs. There is also a section about it in troubleshooting section at the end of PDF.

    Tom
     
    Last edited: Mar 11, 2014
  39. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    Mip levels shouldn't be culprit here. I barely remember the issue but would say I was fixing something like this months ago. Anyway - I'll just follow your list exactly step by step using newest Unity (4.3.3 to be precise) on fresh project and RTP3.1 installed before release to be sure you won't run into this anymore.

    ATB, Tom

    P.S. Atlases are now generated automaticaly when they are missing and in usage (8 layers mode or new 4 layers with atlas), we don't need to press "Prepare..." button, only when we'd like.
     
    Last edited: Mar 11, 2014
  40. Setmaster

    Setmaster

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    Just bought your great asset, looking forward to 3.1.
     
  41. Deleted User

    Deleted User

    Guest

    Hi Tom,

    when I compose splats with bitmaps (generated in Photoshop or World Machine etc.) under the "Coverage" menu, the UV Blending doesn't work anymore. All the blending parameters have absolutely zero influence. Is this supposed to work like this or is it a bug?

    Thanks,
    Sean
     
  42. ilookha

    ilookha

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    Cool stuff, thanks Tom!

     
  43. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    Coverage and UV blend are not much related. This is strange, but I'd say the problem is placed somewhere else. Maybe global UV blend multiplier (in settings/uv blend) was dialed down to zero for some reason ?

    Tom
     
  44. Deleted User

    Deleted User

    Guest


    For some reason it suddenly resumed working. Not sure what I did. I think it worked again after I assigned the 4th texture to the terrain.
    Strange thing.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Mar 12, 2014
  45. Tanoshimi2000

    Tanoshimi2000

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    I'm having problems with the Alphas. Basically, I have a ton of really good seamless textures that are in jpg format. In RTP3 they're shiny, so I know I need Alpha channels added (personally, I think the default for not having an alpha channel should be to make it zero, or non-shiny, since this is the default condition of most materials). I've opened them in Photoshop, added alphas, and now they're not shiny, but they're not as sharp as they were. They're quite blurry or misscaled. Also, I didn't want to use BMP's for size reasons, but if I try to use PNG with an all black Alpha channel, they show up as transparent everywhere except RTP (like windows explorer, which is very inconvenient).

    So, my question would be. In order to get a directory tree full of hi def jpgs to work without being shiny in RTP, what do I need to do?
    -Chris
     
  46. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    OK, no matter what it was you need to consider we definitely need 4 or 8 layers. Setup like 3 layers may cause problems. Esp. when UV blend routing might be set to take blend texture from inexisting (4th) layer.

    Tom
     
  47. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    I definitely see your point. As you don't use specularity features (using RGB jpgs) good thing in RTP3.1 will be gloss multiplier per layer. In RTP3.0 alpha channel defines spec strength (spec mask) while glossiness (shininess) is set per layer as constant. In RTP3.1 we've got new PBL rendering pipeline which means alpha channel defines glossiness (inverted roughtness) of layer. I put a few spec term modulators per layer which you can use to adjust PBL spec shading. For you most important will be "gloss multiplier" - set to low value and your layer will be dull. This way people can use RGB texture and alpha channel will be get as 1, but after multipliacation set per palyer you can set constant roughtness of layer to any value (even zero).

    Tom
     
  48. lazygunn

    lazygunn

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    Just in case Tom doesnt turn up soon - In my usage of if, which involved enormous amounts of terrain last i was using it a few weeks back, it did make a heavy hit if you had all the dials up if you went over 9 or so terrains, i had.. a couple of hundred terrains and it was running but not quickly - however the shader does have a setting for using many terrains, the features were more of a subset than the full strength rtp but it ran well and the features provided were still perfectly adequate

    I cant remember if this is the right context in which he told me for something he said, but he suggested I could technically make a copy of the RTP shaders i wanted to have diferent settings for and apply them as needed, i dont know if he meant that in a kind of LOD context though. I havent found RTP any big problem on a lot of terrains though, that was down to RTP as it looks good in multiterrain mode too, and I think it's possible to indeed adjust your shaders based on distance - My slowdowns were more because i wasnt able to assign different shaders to terrains, based on distance with the tool i was using to organise such a large amount of terrain (Which is a really great tool if you want to do anything with multiple terrains, called Terrain Composer, i think the creator is currently hard at work creating the next version which I can imagine will have a good deal of functionality for dealing with such)

    I'm not actually sure of the performance implications of switching shaders around like that but i'm certain there are some good methods for getting large amounts of terrain rendering very well with RTP at its core, i just personally lacked the technical ability and didnt want to nag the devs all day and night
     
    Last edited: Mar 13, 2014
  49. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    Multiple terrains - yes. Look at http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/218650-24-Hour-Terrain-Demo demo made using RTP shaders. This is very large terrain. Although it's using 4 large terrains, we tested large setups with Nathaniel - like 16x16 terrains.

    The only thing you need to consider is not RTP shader, but Unity terain culling bottleneck.
    You shouldn't use RTP with terrain materials or you will bring down CPU (not GPU) to knees when high amount of terrains are rendered. W/o materials (using redefined/replaced terrain shader) you can get quite good performance. There was a demo made for UnityFS (look at forum or assetstore) - flight simulator. Nathaniel made this using his world composer, terrain composer and RTP shaders. On the top of this we can fly a plane over quite a large piece of multiple terrains.

    Tom
     
  50. SimStm

    SimStm

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    tomaszek, I'm having a little issue and I really don't know why.

    I'm using RTPv3 with TerrainComposer/WorldComposer. Well, the terrain is fine, used World Machine to modify heightmap/generate splatmap, changed textures, etc.

    But the RTP Shaders are giving a very bright/shiny look to the terrain, I mean, the terrain looks like if he was made of gold. Tried to follow the video tutorial, read the PDF but without success... Can you give me some help?

    For example:
    $7uxhG.jpg

    =====================

    Nevermind, I got it.

    Reading some posts here I found the solution. Just go to Settings > Main and adjust the "Specular Color" :)
     
    Last edited: Mar 14, 2014