Relief Terrain Pack (RTP) v3 on AssetStore

Milos,

I've just checked this on my side. The assetbundle exporter you gae the link to I had to set the output platform to PC (it was set to Android while I dont' have Android pro licesnse to try). First I had to make terrain object a prefab to be able to export it as unit3d file. While making a prefab I had to make sure all textures used on terrain are _SAVED to _DISK_ because otherwise making prefab out of terrain with ReliefTerrain script would result in prefab with missing texture references.

Then on fresh scene I used your script. Both - w/o or with synchronous loading (using yield return w1; or not) I get fine results. The only thing was I tested this in editor and had to comment a part of code in ReliefTerrainGlobalSettingsHolder.cs which is invoked in editor to add LODmanager to the scene. It caused popin up window with info that "_RTP_LODmanager object has been added to the scene" and I had to refresh terrain again to make it working. W/o this part of code present (I assume that's how it works in build) it just worked for me. I used materials checked box in LOD manager (so our terrain object has material assigned).

What's exactly your setup when you try this ? Target platform ? Do you use materials ?

Tom

 

Does lars foliage shader play well with RTP? I see it has slope aware lighting and a few features to make bill boarding a little better.

 

How do you pack 2 normalmaps in 1 texture (for the vertex blend shader)?

I know you have a texture mixer tool but I can't use it for various reasons.

You say in a help file;

Combined bumpmaps are made like this:
1. open Window/Relief Tools/4 to 1 texture channel mixer
2. target texture channels are:
- R = A from 1st bumpmap
- G = G from 1st bumpmap
- B = A from 2st bumpmap
- A = G from 2st bumpmap

But my normalmap alpha channels don't exist, and yet when I generate the texture something show up in R channel Oo.

Also, using your tool I get a PNG texture with only RGB channels, no alpha but there's PNG transparency.

I'm confused ^^, could you explain what I should do to create my own mixed normalmap texture?
Is the PNG file format a requirement?

Regards

 

We use lars'es stuff on our island demo and it works fine, but specifically - slope aware feature I can't tell because I haven't played. You can ask lars on his forum. I'm not sure if slope aware foliage is something placed as free/extra meshes or part of terrain engine (thus we don't have full control over this.

Tom

 

Some geom blend vertex controlled shaders in RTP uses combined normals, and some not. I don't know the reason you couldn't use my mixer for this because such textures are made just by getting right color channel from normal texture and putting in right place of my combined texture.

you can, however try to make a trick. RTP script can make it for you. Specify 2 adjancet layers (for example layer 1 and 2) normalmaps you'd like to combine and then go to combined textures/normal maps and save the texture for usage in geom blend shader. You'll have to take care about sizes - nomalmaps need to be of the same size. If you have problems - assign none as normalmap in RTP per layer bump texture slot and then assign 2 bumpmaps (of the same size) there back. Then save it in combined/normals tab.

PNG stores alpha channel which is needed for combined textures (RG+BA used). If you can't access your normalmap alpha, it's probably caused your normalmap isn't marked "as nomralmap" in its texture settings. You should mark it "normal map" type and check "readable" before you deal with channel mixer.

Tom

 

Sorry I should have mentioned, the main issue is that I'm unable to use substances normalmaps. I want to make my own substance that generates the appropriate output for that shader.

Your tool does not allow substance input. This said it doesn't matter, I want to use substances; download size matters in my situation.

I wish to make my own substance that generate the right output based on two normalmaps I generate within the substance.
The problem is that the alpha channel of those substances are empty, normal maps are stored in RGB.

How do I mix two RGB normal maps into one RGBA texture?

 

Afaik, you have to take the R G channel of each normalmap, B channel gets dropped.

 

@bigzer - if your normalmaps are classical RGB textures (not compressed asDXT nm) take xy components - should work as Becoming said.

Tom

 

Hi Tom,

target platform is Windows. I moved forward and I have some info for You. When I loaded my assetbundle, terrain looks that Your shaders are not working.
But I started to play with values in LOD and I found that when I changed texture for PERLIN everything started to work fine.

My pictures :

step 1 - loaded asset


step2 - select perlin


step3 - set reference to Your perlin texture - terrain is FINE


So inside editor I can fix it - maybe this info can be helpful for You, but how can I fix it inside code ?

Thanks,

Milos.

 

Thx Becoming and Tom, your help is greately appreciated

 

We updated RTP2 from our project to RTP3, everything seem to be fine but I'm facing an annoying issue;

When I try to assign the 4th layer normalmap texture, it fails, the inspector switches to the texture properties and if I go back to the terrain's 4th texture properties the normalmap slot is empty.

I tried different normalmaps and got the same issue.
I verified to make sure all textures have the same size.
(Note this time I'm not using substances)
What should I do?

*Edit*

Ok I thought the size of the textures of one layer needed to be identical but instead they need to be the same according to the type across all layers (same size for all normalmaps, same size for all diffuse etc)

Fixed it and works fine now

 

Sorry for spamming (been working all day on RTP

Do you plan to support Relief terrain vertex blend triplanar in DX11?

Geometry blend 2pm vertex paint does work in DX11 but it only blends 2 maps and has thons of features I dont need.

I wish I could blend 4 maps with paralax and specular, something standard usable everywhere that doesn't seem to exist on the asset store Oo.

 

I guess shader works after loading, but perlin normalmaps are not applied because your prefab loaded from bundle miss it. What's done when you apply perlin normalmap (or just go to perlinmap tab) is that special combined texture is made. Go to Combined textures/special and save it before you export bundle with dependencies. This should solve problem. If not - make sure after loading bundle this texture is present. Then eventualy try to refresh() via script to make sure shader is provided with params and textures needed.

Tom

 

Yes, we don't have such geom blend shader in RTP pack. But such thing has nothing to do with DX11. It can be done in DX9, too. Of course making shader working for DX11 we have to remember about some rules (DX11 HLSL compiler is picky). Tell me what features do you need in such 4 layers shader ? The problem is with 4 layers because A color channel is used for blend value, so - it's easy to make 3 layers version. Eventually - if can make your own vertex painter solution I can make 4 layers version using only RGB - when we sum R+G+B and sum is less than 1 that would be value for 4th chanel coverage (so for 4th channel coverage we would use unormalised coverage value, for example (0,0,0,blend) would mean full 4th layer coverage. Is it make sense for you ?


Tom

 

Sound great and to be honest if you're willing to take the task not too late, I'm willing to pay it as a freelance job for the effort, PM me a price, I'll pay that to you in private and I don't mind if you release this in one of your packages. How does that sound?

Concerning the features, 3 layers are fine if that makes everything simpler especially if it can work with substances out of the box. It's possible to tweak substances to add hightmaps or spec maps in the alpha of any generated map so that's perhaps something you can keep in mind.

It should work properly on dx9 and dx11
A specularity parameter is welcome and a height parameter is required.

Basically this is a generic blending shader that surprisingly does not exist in the assetstore (there are lots of legacy stuff but nothing with parallax).

By the way I see you're doing a lot of relief shaders, you might be interested to look at the paralax implementation found in the advanced surface shader pack and try the Parallax Occlusion (D3D) shader. This implementation is far superior to anything I've seen to date though I haven't seen yours yet, I'm buyng it now ^^. It's quite impressive when you tweak the parallax samples correctly though it might be only possible to do on DirectX?

Anyway, I'll wait for your PM if you're interested.

 

@bigzer,

Have you seen my RSP package ? I plan to update this with blending versions, too. Also I've got much more nice ideas how to improve them (for example with BRDF lighting, etc.) The only problem is time... I'm buried with RTP3.1 issues and incoming tools I'd like to provide.

Tom

 

Sorry for the lengthy pms lately btw Tomas, may get a bit tedious, its just rts is now one of 3 systems so far that are central to a project that might take quite a long time to finish (im hoping before the end of 2014 at least), with rtp featuring in almost every single part of it. its pretty funny, if its just me doing something i can fool about all day long, but when my fiancee decides to get involved, i need to know exactly what each thing im using can do, or will do, and where i'll have to make things to do what the other stuff cant do. The last option's worrying because i'm not the best of programmers and already have a giant pile of things to do, Time to message some previous project partners on facebook, maybe they can do all that tricky stuff.

 

Hi Tom,

Go to Combined textures/special and save it before you export bundle with dependencies. This should solve problem.

Yes, it solved problem.

Thank You very much.
Have a nice night.

Milos.

 

did all the discussion die on this thread or is it my computer?

 

I'm hoping to spark it up a little again quite soon when i start getting stuck into world composer, quite looking forwards to it but some updates to some assets are much anticipated before i try go for anything 'serious' looking cause the promised features really do sound amazingly useful, hurry up folks!

 

No, it's just me lurking a bit with new features that I'd like to present, but have no screenshots yet .

Tom

 

This is so fantastic. I've been using ATS Ultra (really great btw) because it supports colormaps, but this is unreal, I might just toss the colormaps out next time. Awesome work, I will have to try this out for my next project.

 

Just made our purchase yesterday and I'm thrilled! Our height blending problems are solved and we can now blend all our layers perfectly. Even with our very stylized look, it looks so much better than alpha blending.


Since our game is played from a classic RTS perspective, we do not have a very natural terrain, but a rather stylized one with steep cliffs that visually encompass the playable space. Thus, we previously had severe stretching issues on the cliffs. I have now tried the triplanar mapping option and it solves these issues. However, it does also create some strongly visible seams. Since I'm not really familiar with that mapping method: Is there a way/strategy to circumvent this?

 

Hi, to make triplanar work fast I do the following:

1. close distance - blended seams (much slower - have to blend all mapping drections at seams)
2. far distance - hard seams

In case of your big rocks texture we could eventually make seams blending more soft compromising performance. In RTP3.1 I also tweaked a bit code for this, so it's advisable to wait some for new version then I can guide you what to change in sahder code to make it more gradual at seams. Any way you have to consider that you'll always have seams - that's the way triplanar works. It's no automagical uvunwrap made at shader level.

Tom

P.S. Nice screenshots ...

 

Beautiful, odd and beautiful

Glad to see such stylized artwork realized with RTP! Maybe you want to post something in the RTP Showcase Thread!

 

Has anyone ever done a guide / tutorial on a World Machine to RTP work flow?

Just found the post from becoming on Page 14 of the thread that was really helpful.

In the RTP WM2 example project did you pretty much just combine all the bmp outputs to create the color map for RTP?

The alternative to all that is to export each layer from WM2 and combine them in terrain composer right?

 

For global colormap I used WM2 built-in plugin component. Then I mixed this with lighting info (can be generated in RTP in coverage/acquire/get direction). Refer to psd files attached.

Although I made my example scene using RTP's coverage/compose tool you can do the same using Terrain Composer. More - TC can make it proceduraly w/o necessity to go thru intermidient step of doing grayscale coverage masks - you've got many options and rules for coverage to choose there.

Tom

 

Hi Tom,

I would like o set some values for Heightblend AO, but in my project I have not available this item.
what I need to set to have it available ?

On first picture You can see window in my project :

On this picture is what I want to achieve :



What I need to do, please ?

Regards,

Milos.

 

Could you look at your console (runtime errors) ? I can't understand why you've got all RTP icons missing on the buttons ...

Tom

BTW - have you noticed Terrain Composer has 24h deal now ? If you don't have it - for things you can do on this plugin it's a deal !

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

 

Now I saw error :


NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
ReliefTerrainEditor.OnInspectorGUI () (at Assets/ReliefPack/Editor/ReliefTerrain/ReliefTerrainEditor.cs:1753)
UnityEditor.InspectorWindow.DrawEditors (Boolean isRepaintEvent, UnityEditor.Editor[] editors, Boolean eyeDropperDirty) (at C:/BuildAgent/work/d3d49558e4d408f4/Editor/Mono/Inspector/InspectorWindow.cs:850)
UnityEditor.DockArea:OnGUI()

I downloaded last version from asset store and with this version I have error >

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
ReliefTerrainEditor.OnInspectorGUI () (at Assets/ReliefPack/Editor/ReliefTerrain/ReliefTerrainEditor.cs:1759)
UnityEditor.InspectorWindow.DrawEditors (Boolean isRepaintEvent, UnityEditor.Editor[] editors, Boolean eyeDropperDirty) (at C:/BuildAgent/work/d3d49558e4d408f4/Editor/Mono/Inspector/InspectorWindow.cs:850)
UnityEditor.DockArea:OnGUI()

 

This is sometimes a case when you manipulate number of layers after RTP is attached to terrain. This moment I can only advise you removing RTP from terrain object(s) and reattach it again. Tell me if this fixes the problem.

Tom

 

I couldn't resist and have to show what Peter made with Nathaniel in 24h - it's 900 sq km big. That's really big... And most expensive part is ... grass (no, not RTP ).



They hid easter egg somewhere over there (hehe it's only 30km x 30km area to search). And yes - following what they promised I'll give first one who find the treasure RTP3 for free and early RTP3.1 beta access .

Tom

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/218650-24-Hour-Terrain-Demo?p=1459918#post1459918

 

I'm getting an odd error.
The demo scenes that comes with RTP work fine. Replacing the layer textures and global textures in the demo scene with my own works fine.
But when I create my own scene and terrain, using the same settings and textures that just worked in the demo, the extrusion is no longer working correctly. What happens is the extrusion seams to shift relative to the terrain objects origin
and the camera. For example if the cameras position is to the left of the terrain origin the lower portion of my height maps are pulled the the left. If I move the camera's position to the the right of the terrain origin it shifts to the right. I've checked all my settings and textures and everything matchs what works correctly in the demo. the only difference is its my terrain.

I've even tried reinstalling Unity and RTP no luck.

 

Thanks for pointing it out... you are on 32 bit i assume, Nathaniel made the build for 64 bit, we thought it would be compatible for both 32bit and 64bit!
we will fix it asap!

 

I hope finding this issue is little bit similar to finding The egg ;-)

Milos.

 

I believe that position of terrain doesn't matter but you probably ran into "big triangles" issue. When you use parallax mapping on meshes that consist of very big triangles results will be broken (view direction in tangent space is badly approximated then - issue of any parallax shader). When your terrain is quite flat it might be Unity terrain engine produces very big triangles - test it in scene view choosing "wireframe" option (or tex+wireframe). In such case make your terrain just a little bit "wavy" to force Unity making smaller triangles.

Tom

 

Thanks for the quick response. That was the problem. Adding some noise to the height map fixed my problems.

Thanks
Travis

 

@OP

Hi,
Your shaders are compatible with Planetary Terrain?
You should contact the developer this tool because it is profitable for both of you.

 

Honestly can't tell as I don't know the method used by HenryV to render his planet model. It's probably kind of custom shader. As I see this probably accept multilayer, but I should first know how he control the detail coverage. Vertex color ? If so - it might be possible shade the planet with specialised shader included in RTP package - triplanar that takes coverage from vertex colors (this for example works for voexel terrains like TerraVol which RTP has been tested with).

Tom

 

Is this compadible with VoxelLand Terrain?

 

Thanks for the reply.

 

Hi. tomaszek am impressed of your RTP asset. If will be compatible with Planetary Terrain I will buy it. POZDRAWIAM.

 

You probably mean Denis Pahunov's VoxelLand ? As in case of Planetary Terrain I would first need to know more details about the rendering pipeline used by its developer. Do we have access to mesh (I assume it's dynamically created) ? Does they use regular Unity rendering pipeline (material/mesh renderer). Does their shader use vertex colors for coverage. What about uv mapping. Do they use it ? If so, how ? And so on... It's best to suggest HenryV and Denis to contact me, I can provide them with RTP for tests.

Tom

 

Hello Tom, i'm sorry if this is a stupid basic question, well i'm trying to figure out this problem looking at the forums and documentation, but i have to ask you.

What's going on which those spot and point lights? some light squares allways appears around them.



Thanks.

 

No, your question is quite reasonable, but of the scope of RTP. It's Unity terrain engine bug, not mine. Seems to happen when using strong lights (was the case for me):

RTP shader:


... and default Unity's shader:


So - sorry, can't help here...

ATB, Tom

 

Hi folks,

Had hard time (number of special cases/features and permutations of RTP shader is more and more pain to leash...) and wasn't able to sort all this stuff before Christmas. I hope I can handle this at the very beginning of 2014 so RTP3.1 beta will be available to selected users.

I can give you a bit of teaser only now. As you probably know, besides of huge amount of new features and improvements, RTP3.1 will have IBL cubemap sampling (diffuse spec). As diffuse is maybe not very interesting (similar results can be achieved using complementary lights), spec IBL might be nice for somebody who really need precise world reflection calcs (current reflection feature is approx and doesn't sample cubemaps but squeezed "dome"):

First I shaped-out my own shader that's PBL (physically based, taken from Black Ops Lazarov's paper, but with ^4 instead of ^5 fresnel for better performance) with IBL (cubemap) diffuse/specular part. Left one is Skyshop's while mid, right are mine. I can't figure out yet why I've got some sampling ddx/ddy artifacts (resulting in 2x2 cluster pixelisation at the egdes of glossmap change) but I'll try to fix it, anyway - it's visible only on the very contrsty edges, so for terrains this example is not representative at all (we don't use mirror rocks, do we ?):


Some glass terrain looks funny, but is fully integrated with skyshop (yes - attach right cubemap in its "Sky" object and it works out of the box). Of course skyshop isn't necesary, but very handy here as it manages HDR cubemaps quite OK (and has built-in convolution tools to make them out of .hdr files):


RTP3.1 introduces quite a new set of params per layer (zoom in screenshot below and look at the inspector). You may notice (hintbox) that now we go "PBL". Alpha channel of detail texture is now considered to be glossmap instead of specularity map (gloss mask) like it's in current version. It gives more artistic freedom and is just more "true" in terms of of what we've got in real world. Glossiness (hardness/reflectivity - names are different depending on software) is more important than Specularity. First one defines "how wide" is specular spot, second defines it's strength. But in PBL as the surface is more soft (rough) specular strength is also diminished due to energy conservation which is now taken into account in calculations. Unfortunately we can't dig into rendering pipeline for deferred (it's done internally in Unity), but in forward we've got it all now:
1. normalisation term (for energy conservation)
2. fresnel term
3. visibility term

23 we can disable in LODmanager (if we like to configure superfast set of features - complex visibility term isn' t that important like normalisation).

IBL reflection exposition value below is exagerrated for you to see "what we are talking about":


As it works per layer we can even make funny mirror rocks popping out of another layer:



With more fresnel used (reflections at edges only):


To avoid texture trashing I introduced param that can be also helpful when we would like to smooth normalmap taken for IBL/reflection calculations - in extreme case it looks like coated surface (IBL normals are flat while normals for direct lighting are untouched). Note how the glossmask (detail A channel) taken for glossiness affects reflections (only big rocks are glossy enough on the detail texture alpha channel to consitute pure mirror):



Of course all above examples are not much realistic nor interesting, but shows the progress and ideas I'm currently working on.

I'll provide you with more info after Christmass. Then more complete list of news for RTP3.1 will be presented (a long list).

Tom

P.S. And of course - Merry Christmas everyone !

 

But others maybe can, Nathaniel opened this vote on unity feedback: http://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/improved-unity-terrain-core-engine
its going quite well so, everybody keep on voting! Or, if you dont have any votes left move your votes over to it

 

Tom, great news about IBL. I currently use Skyshop for my terrain as IBL just makes everything look so good.

Will be very interested if I can use RTP for terrain while using Skyshop for everything else, while maintaining consistent lighting.

 

No, this is not a terrain engine bug, well, i dont think because my classic terrain works as spected using spot lights without relief terrain pack.

But, after 4 hours dealing with RPT settings i've noticed that if i had "Ambient Correction" set to black, "Diffuse Strenght" set to zero, and "Specular Strengt" set to zero at the same time, this bug goes out.

OOh man, i was getting kinda sad and starting to conform myself using Unity default terrain shader.



By the way, nice update! hehe i'm waiting for that!

Yeah, unity terrain engine sux for now...


Thanks Tom for your active support!