Relief Terrain Pack (RTP) v3 on AssetStore

As you said, rate is not the same for everyone. And it also depends if you use existing assets or you create everything by you own.
Workflow is important too, by using tools like mudbox+worldmachine to sculpt the terrain and crazybump/b2m to generate maps you can get nice results very fast.
About time, scardeep, my last zone took me around 70 hours (most assets are coming from asset store)

For mountain, my advice is to avoid paint surfaces. The best is to use geometry places by hand or use the tool now include
in RTP 3 to export terrain with steepness value between 70 and 90 degree. Import obj in your modeling tool as a base, and create
cliffs by using this reference. You can sculpt nice rocks and unfold correctly uv as well. Import these models in unity and maybe
try to use geometry blend shader to merge 3d rocks with terrain. You can create set of rocks and place them in the zone too (it's my technic actually)

 

If I get you right - you'd like to know how to maange detail etexture coverage over terrain ? If so - use WM to extract for example steepness maps, flow maps, etc. and then you can use RTP coverage tools to compose it on terrain. You can, however do the coverage map (aka control map) in WM, too but haven't tried it. That gives professional results. Do automatically as much as you can. You'll quickly realise that painting whole terrain coverage by hand can be very tedious...

Overhangs - model them and stick to terrain. Of course you'd like to keep the reference to the terrain in your modeling software. So - export terrain as reference. Then use geom blend tris painting tool to place "a patch" will become overhang. Export this mesh and model as you wish. Keep edges untouched so your overhang will perfectly match underlying terrain. Unwarp, import back to RTP. Use shader needed (1/2 layers can be mixed with additional features that makes it similar to terrain like perlin normal, uv blend or global colormap, but in case of global colormap after uwraping you wont have it good synced - you can adjust this feature in shader sdisabling it for overhang).

Cliffs - use triplanar texturing in RTP or do the same as above - paint tris on cliffs, export, unwarp, import back - ready unstretched cliff.

Only on geom blend meshes. They are vertex paint friven - for example 2 layers with water geom blend shader gets R color channel to choose layer, B is water coverage (it's adjustable though in define section of shader). A - blending. G - in some cases is also used - refer to description put at the shader code beginning.

I doubt it... For POM shading definitely not. Maybe in a few years when we'll get even stronger hardware some new ideas will become practical.

Tom

 

When i started to use RTP i felt that this is a drawback but actually its not, it ensures to have the same texture resolution everywhere. In my opinion this is a good thing. With the various features you can counter any visible tiling very well and with the new UV blend options that are coming with RTP 3.1 it wont be a problem at all. Nathaniel posted a video further up in the thread and you can already see the feature in action... no tiling visible at all and still very high resolution in close ups. However, also with the current version you can hide the tiling vey well. Use at least 2 different cliff layer textures(maybe even 3) and blend them with a noise, use perlin normal, UV blending and maybe vertical texturing. You wont see any tiling at all.

 

Hi Peter

Thanks for the clear explanation... I was kinda aware of this from Trial-and-Error... but you put it into one simple brilliant graphic.

So I assume what I should do:
- Make my Tarmac Texture very dark, reduce the range -> gets flatter, will be always below the other textures at the blend point.
- Make my Sand Texture so that it sits in the middle
- Make sure the stones/rubble texture is brightest, so they sit on top of the tarmac and sand most of the time.

I will certainly experiment with these over the weekend.

As a WM User, and a Programmer having wasted months last year and the year before to improve the Terrain Tool in Unity and then come up with a similar solution in another engine, I would be highly interested to find out how to do my coverage maps in WM!

Writing this kind of functionality was tedious, frustrating, and while the end result on the second try was pretty good, I don't want to spend the time again after switching engines again (and my original solution in Unity was buggy, at best).

Is there any good Tutorial on that? I have some expierience with WM, but I always struggled how to get something like a coverage for rubble, which usually is found under rocks. What WM Node is a good starting point for an imported heightmap from unity?


Thanks a lot for any help on this. And don't let the negativity on the last page drag you down. You got a 5 star review in exchange from me, for 6 Months of outstanding support.

And really, I also find it hard to understand the hype around the Marmoset shaders. I bought it when they were 50% because... well, mostly because of the hype. So I guess I should now find out for myself if they can live up to it... but I kinda doubt it, as I'm not really looking for a reflective shader

Holy moly, almost missed this, that sounds great! Emissive Terrain shader? Yay! That might actually be very useful to me down the line (if my prototype gets transformed into a demo, this will somehow "catch fire" and I realize the full game next year), and I am sure lots of others will find ways to do amzing stuff with this!

And the rest sounds great too. Keep up the good work!

 

Thank you so much for getting back to me.

I went back into world machine and exported a good color and splatmap to get textures right. I was able to get the color map to display easily but do I need another plugin to do splatmaps?

I know RTP3 works with terrain composer but what about Tom's Terrain Tools (the cheaper of the splat map plugins)?

Also, I tried getting triplaner working with 8 layers and an add pass but I guess I don't understand how the add pass works because I can only get triplaner working with 4 layers. Is it possible to get triplaner working with 8 layers?

Thanks again.

 

Yeah I figured out how to get rid of the tiling on cliff faces. Starting to understand things more .

 

Hi Guys, few tips about WorldMachine and coverage maps/distribution maps/splatmaps:

use select slope, select height, select convexity, bitmap input(for noises, or handpainted stuff), etc. for coverage maps
use color generators to visualise your layers
use choosers (and occasionally combiners) to layer the results... remember what gets drawn on top covers whats below anyway
what you feed into the 3rd input of the choosers is what you need to feed into the bitmap outputs(these are what you need to put into terrain composer or the coverage tool of RTP)
use the overlay view node to visualize what you get.
not shown here in the graph but what gets plugged into the overlay view can be used as colormap...



You dont need any other plugins to do the coverage, its all in RTP but still, i highly recommend Terrain Composer, it can save you countless hours if you are working with terrains!

Good luck and have fun,
Peter

edit: I forgot to mention, this is just a simple example with 3 layers, you need to think about what you want to achieve, this is just the basic concept! Also if you are using Terrain Composer you can directly put in splatmaps that are made in worldmachine and you dont need to do it with single coverage maps that are layered(but you still can and sometimes its usefull)

edit2: OneShotGG, Yes triplanar and 8 layers is possible, you have to set it up in the LODManager, it should be explained in the RTP Documentation(Its long and prbably not the most thrilling read but its very detailed and i recommend to read through once, its definitely worth it). However if you still have questions, you'll find help here

 

That looks mighty interesting... very helpful to see what others do with this complex tool.

I see now what you do for a simple example... but what about a more complex one? What do you recommend to get coverage for rubble flows below steep cliffs (rock)? But you don't want the rubble to cover the mountain tops, thus can't just simply use slope as criteria?

I experimented combining slope + inverted convexity, which seemed to work sometimes.... any better idea for this case? Even after years of using WM from time to time I still feel like a newbie in this program, so I would love to see how more expirienced users solve a problem like this.


Cheers

Gian-Reto

 

Ah, ok now i get it Yeah that is a problem i run into aswell, i have no good tip to be honest, i use an ambient occlusion map to get this, though it has to be baked in other applications and its not a perfect solution. I was already thinking about suggesting to get a feature for this in the WM forum.
Also, often i do such tweaks afterwards in unity with the paint tools, but its bad when things need to be changed from the ground up... I will ask Nathaniel maybe he can get a good solution for it in Terrain Composer, it's already as powerful as WorldMachine except for the erosion/flowmap.

edit: Another thing that just came to my mind: deposition maps, though i am not sure. It might be possible to get the flow maps/deposition maps help on this task, i think with special erosion settings it might be possible. Rock hardness to the minimum and very few iterations maybe...
If you find a good way to do it let me know

 

I've been using world machine lately and i'm getting fantastic results. Remember.... you can export your height map from TC, import it to WM.... do your erosion.... then re-import the height map back into TC into a filter. Done. Im also looking at using the WM normal map converter node applying it globally so i can have all the nice erosion detail but use a higher pixel error setting for better performance.
This may already be possible.... but if you could import all these different maps... ie color, height, normal, flow, and various control maps into TC into a filter like you do a height map, then it would make things so much easier. You would not have to use WM tiles or cut the maps up yourself. They would just apply across all the terrain tiles. That would be sweet!



I think TC will give you the ultimate flexibility in placing detail and trees. I also thought about a script that would keep the terrain tile you were currently on and keep it at a certain pixel error setting, and then dials the rest of the tiles up quite a bit. I dont know if that setting is global or per terrain or if its even feasible. If so you could setup say 3 LOD levels where your current tile and the ones surrounding it are at a decent pixel error level, then the next concentric ring of tiles at a higher setting... and the last concentric ring at an even higher setting. Sorry... i know this is not TC forum but i saw post on WM and had to chime in. All you guys are great people. I have nothing but love for Tom and Nathaniel. All you guys rock!

 

Hm, I don't think I really experimented long with the deposition maps... it didn't look like it would do the job out-of-the-box and I gave it up.

I think I will cobble something together in WM as soon as I have some more pressing things off the plate, and see what I can do with the different tasks. WM really is a powerful tool but I get lost easely, so there certainly is still a huge amount of potential in it.

Good idea with the ambient occlusion... something to try out as crazybump might do the trick there.

 

Regarding worldmachine, absolutely every map you get out of it can be useful, and you have a lot of options there too. The other thing I noticed was that you seemed to be relying too much on the terrain itself to provide everything you need for a scene. The terrain is your base layer and anything that is exposed obviously has to look the business and the blending of so many POM materials really does look brilliant for that kinda thing, but you definitely shouldnt rely only on the terrain itself, it's just not versatile enough for a lot of the proper shapes you see in nature. Have a good look at Botumys stuff, its brilliant and uses 3D models very carefully to evoke shapes and pleasing perspectives.

I havent used that awesome free decal system on rtp yet so not sure how well it goes, but i was getting to grips with it on something else and some normal mapped decals bringing variation over your scenery can look fantastic and theres a perfectly excellent product for it on the asset store for free!

I said this elsewhere today but it was such a good thing to remember i figured i should say it again - anyone thking of doing anything with this should get themselves a sub to www.gametextures.com. It's not that just the diffuse maps are well made, every texture is designed and accounts for almst every need you have for a texture and supplementary maps for almost any shader you can think of - the mid range sub gets you textures up to 1k by 1k and you get diffuse, specular, normal, gloss (or roughness however you want to see it), height, transparency and so on, absolutely invaluable for having a go to place where you'll have everything you need to get the most out of POM based shaders straight away. It's all very well having fancy shaders but if all you've got to use them with are some jpegs you got off cgtextures youre wasting your money and missing the point

 

Try to experiment with all the "special" outputs from the erosion node, they can give you a pretty nice result with rubble flows.
For absolute best results however you probably need to add some manual love to it : )

 

You are right, at the moment I rely too much on RTP to make my level look good... because I did not had the resources yet to build a big stack of level geometry, and I don't want to get cheap one that does not fit our art style and other needs.

I am pretty sure that a good amount of well designed level props and geometry for rocks and cliffs will take my level to the next stage, however I do hope that with the solid foundation that I get from RTP, I can go easier on the amount level geometry needed besides the Terrain to make things look good. That is why I try to get the coverage and texture blend right, so I can add to it, instead of kind of patching the failings up with level geometry.

I also started using a decal system for my vehicles, both for dynamic bullet holes at runtime (which worked fine with just a little changes to the example scripts), and for adding Symbols and Numbers to the different vehicles. I have not tried it on the Terrain yet as I was not sure how much it would blend in with Toms Terrain Shaders. Will give it a spin, and maybe we will get a decal system integrated into RTP with a future Release that Tom makes sure will blend into the Terrain just fine? Who knows what Tom is up to next

I had a quick look at the link you mentioned before and it does look like high quality stuff. Being eager to do my own textures to make sure everything fits together, I am still highly interested to get at least the heightmaps from their page, as painting the heightmap in Photoshop proved too be a massive task that I would like to avoid.... the prices for the midtier sound reasonable for what you get, so I think you are spot on: If they can deliver what they promise, its a mandatory resource for every RTP User, even if he wants to do create his own diffuse textures.

Yes, I think you are right there... however each of the output by themselves might not get you the right coverage, blending them together the right way might do the trick.

I'm happy to apply the last 20% (or let my new leveldesigner do it, if that works out) of the work manually.... but having to paint all the rubble flows from scratch is a little bit much.

 

Yeah, i see that similiar and also the island demo is an experiement around how far we can go with terrain only... it turned out it can go very far, even without meshblending to cover the steep parts, the results are very good. I think that you can save up to 90% of additional geometry just because the naked terrain looks fantastic. If you work with additional geometry and use the RTP shaders for it(and the meshblending features) i am sure really extreme graphics are possible. The island demo looks pretty good i think and i am quite happy with the results but actually its the first terrain that i am doing with RTP so i am sure this is only scratching on the surface of what can be done.

I am really curious what you guys come up with and i hope you will post some results, discussing the best workflows will be very helpfull. Soo many things are possible now and we just need to figure out the best ways to do it, the tools are definitely there.

As for decals, the paint triangles and meshblend feature is already a decal system, of course its not meant for bullet holes and the like but for setdressing its already top notch!

 

Composing interesting coverage (control) maps is possible in Terrain Composer. WM can do this but you have to link all these mask compoennts and combine into RGBA maps which is possible I know, but might be complex. In RTP you've got tool to compose coverage out of greyscale masks produced in WM - that can be also handy.

In regards to triplanar in 8 layers mode - no, it's not possible. You have to use 4 layers mode instead, so max number of layers useable is 8 then (4+4). However I'd recommend to use triplanar only for one pass and put there layers that appear on slopes (rocks ?). Rest put on pass with regular shading (w/o triplanar) - for example sand, grass which probably don't need to appear on cliffs that you'd like to "unstretch". That's perfromance wise as triplanar isn't cheap. Use it for both passes only when actually needed.

Tom

 

Yeah, adding them all together is what im doing atm, also you might want to limit it by height as well depending on if you want the flow on the flatter terrain as well or not.

You can see a very, very WIP screen of the result here:

 

I tried World Machine for a while but could never get the results I wanted(probably since its a bit complicated with all the nodes) ...so I went with L3DT instead http://www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/ ... it asks you a set of questions and it allows you to modify your terrain with draw tools and such ...then it builds the terrain for you..

Made planet terrain with it for my space game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=YJWdCNn-AwA#t=571 watch the next couple of minutes from that point ..that is L3DT terrain ...use the 720p setting to see it clearly.. please don't mind the ship ..that was just for testing purposes ...I know it sux badly.


Now I think im going to try to mix L3DT terrain with RTP3 to make the planets look better from a distance AND up close.

 

Too bad unity does not support planetoid terrains, but luckily with RTP on mesh you can have great results too. I really like your video, the atmosphere is great - i mean the actual planets atmoshpere and the overall atmosphere(mood) to it aswell Let us see more as you progress!!

Its true, mixing all the stuff together gives better results(i think using a pixel noise to blend between things is a great for more advanced setups).
Another suggestion for WM(although matter of personal taste): I find that for cliffs using almost no falloff on the slope select gives the best results.

 

I honestly wouldn't forget the rest of the maps, they really do make a diference, i am actually going to have a look at Tom's RTP as it stands now and see what maps it DOES take, but i'd imagine a diffuse, height and normal at the very least. If there's room to pack stuff in the alpha channels and it work with the shader then thats exciting but i'm sure he's probably taken that to the max already

Regarding non-terrain assets, I find the non-fantasy-specific models in the Big Environment Packs (this is relevant as i just posted in the thread for the new one) look lovely and should be very versatile, esp if yourself or your coworkers can retouch them as needed, that that might be an option.

Otherwise, i could rave abut decals for quite a while, have a look in the asset store for decal systems, there's a free one and its absolutely great, if you want to pay for it it will pack atlases for you but you dont need to pay to get programs that will do that for you. I was overlaying normal-specular mapped high resolution decals with it over surfaces that already had relief/pom shaders on them and they blended really well, even at a distance, and looked absolutely convincing, i was very impressed, split a big patch of very boring samey land into something great looking. I don't think tom should waste his time making a decal system if there's already a perfectly respectable one in the store already for free, but I think it's definitely worth investigating their effects for adding variation to areas that seem a little drab, which would be neither this assets fault or anything else, it just crops up sometimes when doing this kind of thing

One final thing is this: http://scrawkblog.com/2013/10/17/terrain-texturing-using-tile-mapping-in-unity/ this guy's been proving really inspirational to me the last few days and I was wondering if there was something like it in RTP or if there was the actual room to put it in there, or if it would actually work. I've been talking to the fellow a bit and he's very generous with how his work is used and it looks like a really great technique to break things up, but i am speaking from a level of ignorance so I just thought i'd throw that out there

 

I use World Machine as well and use toms terrain tools to apply my splatmap. I have world machine export out a Red Green Blue Alpha map for my splat map 4 textures. I see in the getting started video it requires each channel setup to be black and white in the image. Can RTP v3 just work off 1 splat map RGBA image to apply the 4 textures? Thanks.

 

Hi there! I've been following this thread for a while. I'm very interested in RTP3 for the UV blending, perlin map, geometry blending, and ambient lighting features. However, I'd also like to use a tool like the Axis Game Factory builder to create the heightmap and texture painting for my terrains outside of Unity and then import them into Unity and apply RTP3 afterwards for those features I mentioned.

Is a workflow like what I've proposed possible with RTP3?

 

I didn't meant to not use a diffuse map. I was talking about composing one on your own, with the help of the height map from the gametextures page.
I found painting the colors for a diffuse map a breze as soon as I had a good heightmap thanks the fact the heightlayers could be transformed to layermasks easely with some Photoshop Magic. As long as you don't expect "realistic realistic" textures, I would definitely not shy away from recreating the color maps, if you got some PS or Gimp skills. Helps unifying the look.
Of course, if you are already satisfied with the look of the diffuse map, there is no gain and it would be a waste of time.

But you are right, I would definitiely use height/normal, diffuse AND specular maps for RTP! It would be a waste not to.

I guess I use the same decal system you are talking about for my vehicles. I will definitely buy the pro version one day (even if its just as a "thank you" for the developer for a great asset), and its also great to hear you tested it on the Terrain... I will have to look into it one day. I can see it being very useful for me, as I use Toms Terrain Shader also for my Roads.... some Signs on the Ground could really help with the look, and seeing how fast this Decal System seem to be, they should not cost too much.

Intesting link... I did not understand all of it, but I like the idea. As long as the runtime costs are as little as the guy claims them to be, might be a worthy addition to RTP?

 

Havent tested it on terrain yet, am going to within the hour though, im actually waiting for rtp's shaders to compile this moment, i just got done making a nice enough island-based (Easiest to do without having to think of distance detail and a chance to make a test scene for water systems) and some preliminary maps in world machine, i'll definitely see to testing the decal system soon.

As far as i've read (and i suppose i will see for myself soon too) RTP has a few ways to break up repeating patterns, it just seemed like that one might be worth having a look at

 

Yes, i agree on that, on that image i have no falloff at all for the cliff texture. There are lots and lots to learn : )

 

I'll have to take a look at his method. At first glance he's messing up with texture coordinates moving/stretching them over terrain so they are not strictly top planar set. As he gave project files on his blog probably there is also shader code to analyze. However I don't know if he wouldn't mind if I implement his tech in RTP.

Sure you can just put ready made controlmaps into Coverage/control trexture slots in RTP. The reason I gave people feature to compose from grayscale masks is that it might be considered to be difficult making RGBA normalized textures.

AGF Pro can export terrains to Unity. Then you just get it, apply RTP component, setup textures and params and it should work w/o any problem.
Funny thing is I'm just in the middle of discussion with AGF developer. We probably agree some strategy to cross promote our products. He could put some features of RTP shading in AGF (fixed set as he can't compile shaders like RTP does using LODmanager). I could also support his work recommending this here and there (however my advertising potential isn't that big ). Of course we talk about RTP shading in AGF that can not be just exported to Unity. You'll have to buy RTP separately to get it working in your imported AGF scene in Unity.

RTP geom blend system can be easily adopted to place decals runtime I'd say. What geom blend script can do is just sticking a mesh to the terrain (or paint them so it fits underlying terrain dynamic mesh). All you have to do is changing blending condition in your custom geom blend shader so it doesn't take blending from vertex color alpha channel but from your texture. Additionaly you could even think about decal shader using heightmaps - analysing included geom blend shaders in RTP isn't that hard - thn your runtime duynamic decals could have this nice heightblend behaviour, too.

Although I'll take a look at tile break technique from above, there are at least 5 methods to break tiling in RTP:

1. Use only global colormap at distance (the most effective, but looks nice only if your global colormap is detailed enough)
2. Use global colormap w/o above switch - this also helps a lot if your colormap has "distracting" contrasting details that when multiplied with tiled content hide patterns.
3. UV blending - taking a layer with quite large tile size and multiplying with tiled detail texutres.
4. Perlin normal - when applied can cover a lot tiling
5. Use 2-3 different textures for the same type of material (rocks for example) and blend them using noise mask.

In RTP3.1 we can actually replace tiled detail textures at far distance with UV blend output (instead of multiplying it only like it's now)

ATB, Tom

 

Oh that's awesome! I would definitely buy RTP as well, but if you can integrate its shading into AGF directly, that would be amazing. I just find the ability to build terrain in AGF is more intuitive to me. Maybe because I am just a gamer at heart.

Can't wait to see how your conversations with the AGF developer go!

 

Sounds good! I didn't suggest the link out of expectation mind, it was more cause he's been perfectly happy with me messing around with his water code and my questions and has clear enough said he didnt mind if i used my own translations of his work in assets and suchlike, i have no intention of releasing assets based on his work but am researching and using it a lot in mind of other peoples assets which i'm happy to do just for fun, it keeps me busy and results in a better product i have invested in so the actual game stuff i make with them is miles more impressive. There's all the stuff in the project files anyways, i guess if you ask him he'll be pretty alright with it.

I still didn't get to play with RTP today! I generated my actual terrain and made a few preliminary splat and coverage maps to get started then ended up spending the rest of the day faffing with my unity free oculus thing. When I next wake I hope i get a little bit of a chance

 

Something I'm curious about...more than 8 textures. Is this not doable or practical?

 

When you set 8 layers in first pass mode then you can try this - should be renderd 8+4 (first + add pass). Have you checked this ?

Tom

 

What I did was try adding more than 4 textures, but it would only allow 8. I didn't think about using 8 layers in first pass mode, that makes sense though. Thanks!

 

What I did was constraining ReliefTerrain inspector script to 8 layers when its placed on mesh. In fact I can't remember if everything is "12 layers ready" for meshes because I haven't tested this scenarion (sorry ).

But I'd say you could remove this constraint in ReliefTerrainEditor.cs and check if this works because shaders are prepared for such situation.

Tom

 

Hi Tomas,

A question about mesh blending. I have a problem when I want to blend a geometry with layer 5 to 8 ( second pass). The texture used
is not correct.

 

hmm, it didn't happen on my side but i have not updated to 4.3 yet(i always wait a bit until all the assets i use are updated). It may be that the issue is related to unity 4.3. However if it is a bug and nothing wrong with your settings i am sure Tom will fix it in no time...

Ah, i have an idea what it could be... on the mehsblend material at the very bottom of the inspector there are the splat control map(s) and the combined heightmap(s) slots, it may be that it did not automatically get the right maps or did not update it after changes. Make sure that everything is correctly assigned there. Also if you ever moved the mesh after working on it you may need to rebuild the mesh.

btw: are you using triplanar, or why do you use 2 passes for 8 layers?

 

I've actually come across the wonky tiling uvs thing as an article in a GPU Gem's book, which I suppose that fellow ported over to Unity as is. I spose one could just try find the article with google!

 

I'm using POM in pass1 and PM+triplanar in pass 2. It's possible to use 8 layers mode with this config?

 

If it's something from GPU gems inplemented in Unity I don't have to worry much about intelectual rights issues I guess. But I haven't time to look into this. This moment I'm fighting against using atlas in 4 layers mode. This can save us 3 tex samplers, but of course will take some performance. The biggest problem is to reconfigure shader so it works with atlas in triplanar (nasty number of subscases together with other features permutations makes shader management extremely complex - I'm almost lost in my own code ).

Anyway - thank you for info. Not sure this moment if this algorithm will be applicable to RTP, but it's worth giving it a try as screenshots on scrawks blog looked promising.

Tom

 

It's not possible to use triplanar in 8 layers mode. I'll check this config (POM4+PM4 triplanar) on my side and get back to you. If it works for me I'll ask you to wait a moment as I'm in the middle of RTP3.1 processing... I changed some texture routing code here and there, so maybe it's already fixed (and you'll be one of my first beta testers ). If it won't work for me I'll try to fix this ASAP and give you solution if possible (to tweak a bit of code like previously).

The only problem is time here. Fix in "no time" scenario can not be realised today nor tomorrow, but Monday - I guess so.

I work on U4.3 so RTP3.1 will be "U4.3 tested" (issues due to undo system changes are fixed now).

Tom

P.S. RTP3.1 is on "hot stage" - I'm quite focused on this working all the time only on this now. I hope I can give you something soon.

 

Which is what i'd call no time keep up the awesome work.

@ botumys, have you checked the terrain splat controllmaps/combined heightmaps assigned to the meshblend materials?

 

That's the idea, because we can't make heightblend an geom object with all 8 layers of underlying terrain, but in such case we should see alpha/no heightblend edge while I see hard artifact edge which is probably a bug.

Botumys - give me also geom blend shader name used on the object to test (material used on "Geometry" part of your screenshot).

Tom

 

My material used is GeometryBlend_PM and is synchronized with the terrain. The geometry blend nicely with layer 1 to 5. Layers 6 to 8 are not used.

Thanks Tomas

 

Another question, just to test (because I have to disable crosspass heightblend, and in my case, I need it), I tested Global normal map feature. I encounter the case of grasses on top of normal map influence in close view. The normal map change terrain lightness, but the grasses don't react properly . It's possible to use global normal map only for far ?

 

little test with lightmap:

 

botumys nice work there on terrain , also great skybox texture. Did you made skybox by yourself or perhaps have link to where is possible to download one ?

 

http://www.cgskies.com/
http://www.cg-source.com/products_hdrisky.php?pricat=sky&seccat=hdrisky
http://www.hyperfocaldesign.com/

 

I haven't checked this yet, but you probably mean layers 5-8 (add pass) are not blended well ?

You'd like grass to fit normalmapping applied on terrain surface. That's quite good idea. I believe AFS can do something like this but probably not with grass and - not with any (RTP) shader. Best expert of Unity vegetation system is surely larsbertram, maybe he could put some light on such issue suggesting options we've got. Anyway your idea to use global normal map only on far distance sounds very reasonable as we wouldn't see bright grass on darker terrain areas upclose while still getting high detailed terrain at far distance (w/o degradation of higher pixelError setting). It's simple to do and I could introduce such option in RTP3.1 (global normalmapping at far distance only). Do I understand well your feature request ?

BTW - the best would be grass shader that can get some info from the same map source like RTP and fit grass lighting to this, but this would imply messing not only with RTP terrain surface shaders but also with vegetation. At some future stage I'm sure I'll focus on this issue, too.

Nice comparison. I've been thinking about this already and you just present what we've got:

No lightmaps - we've got high detail due to perlin normalmapping at far distance. You could push a bit up complementary lighting to get similar results to lightmapped versions at unlit parts. A plus - fully dynamic, a minus - lack of shadows (we need to use far realtime shadows distance) and precise global illumination effects.

Dual lightmaps. A plus - we gain global illumination/indirect lighting. A minus - we loose detailed look from normalmapping at far distance (detail seen comes from layers color textures only). Another minus - it's static lighting condition (no sun position modification possible).

Directional lightmaps - almost perfect solution. A plus - we've don't loose normalmapping, although it's not that detailed as in no lightmap version (lightmapper doesn't take perlin normals into account, I'm I right?). A minus - it's not dynamic. BTW - how did you get lightmapped terrain with directional mode - did you used exported terrain model with computed tangents ? Don't know in U4.3, but tangents are not present in terrain - it didn't worked for me when tried this mode and had to use such workaround.

Currently in RTP we could use shadow map (alpha channel of this pixel tree/shadowmap texture)+complementary lights. Global illumination can be baked into globalcolormap, too. Big minus is that global colormap is mixed with detail color via multiplication and is "passive" (needs light to "present itself") not emissive. This is the reason I'd like to introduce separate emissive global map to store global illumination indirect lighting. This would bring very high quality to terrain lighting while it can still be dynamic. Our map could store only the influence of sky (w/o sun in it) on terrain. Question about how to use effectively alpha channel of such texture is opened (maybe as an alternative source of shadowmap ? Any other ideas ?).

Another question is how to get such global emissive map. I remember somebody made toys for Unity to get more out of Beast and making it more configurable. Maybe it would be even possible to ask Beast for making the emissive global map job for us (w/o shadows and direct lighting), but we probably can not ask Beast to light our scene with any IBL "cubemap", but with a single skycolor only.

Anyway I treat very seriously lighting issues and will try to come up with some good solution for this.

This moment most important for me is introducing atlasing in 4 layers mode which gives us more room for additional textures and global maps we can use (for lighting). This all makes my work more and more...exciting .

ATB, Tom

 

For the alpha channel i have an idea: it could be a shadow map but (just like with the dual lightmaps) fading in after the realtime shadow distance. Alltogether it would give the same thing as dual lightmaps but much more flexible and without the drawbacks. Nathaniels way to quickly bake directional shadowmaps (even possible on a seperate thread afaik) could be used then to have day night cycles on the fly. Just a quick idea though, maybe someone else got a better one

Oh, what about cloud shadows... could also be used for this i think.

Since the basis of Beast is Mental Ray, i think it would be possible to just place a big sphere(normals pointing inward) around the scene and set it to emissive, the only question is about the emissive light falloff though. Setting the main light to zero is probably needed because i think one light is at least neccessary to get beast running. It would then only use the sky with the removed sun and give an indirect lighting map. Maybe it can work this way. Ideally though, baking would be done in a 3D app.

 

Cloud maps - they would be really nice, but I'm concerned about implementation. Puting this just as a part of RTP terrain shader is not enough - any other object should be also influenced by such cloud shadows. However I've got an idea we could discuss PM .

Tom

 

i guess cloud shadows are most efficiently rendered using light cookies. doing so the will simply effect everything in the scene: terrain, grass, trees, buildings etc.

and for the free alpha: mask to skip heavy computation on certain layers.

lars

 

I think things like the emissive map are a great idea and i'd like to see how they might be implemented, and i think it'd be great for you to have some ongoing tech-things going into the shader that you can say is experimental until its polished. So that ways you can work on them as it suits you without assuming a lot of pressure, and i do think theres a bunch of fancy tech things you can do now you're somewhat a sage in the world of unity's shaders, certainly compared to the vast majority of art-programming efforts i see. It just starts to depend on what is within the shader's remit given its intended purpose and definitely don't want to see you taking up too much time on peripheral goals - again though, establishing an understanding with your customers where you can say 'this is experimental', noone can complain, you can take as long as you want and you could go in a range of interesting personal choices in direction.