RTP - Relief Terrain Pack v. 2 - features tour

That's great information! I have a question about using RTP on a mesh. The mesh is about 500x500, and I applied primary and secondary UV's in 3ds max, and attached the geometry script and material to the mesh in Unity. I've set the shaders in the manager for mesh, 4 layer, single pass. I've activated the source splat and set the multiplier to 1. But I cannot get the textures to show up. I've tried with both RTP2 and the beta of RTP3. What can I check to troubleshoot and get the materials to show up. Thanks.

 

Have you actually build your control texture ? Activating source textures in Coverage/Compose does nothing until you click build at the bottom of inspector. To be sure try to build your RGBA control textures in any tool (even saving some from ready made Unity terrain) and attach them to right coverage splat control slots in RTp script inspector.

 

Hi Tom,

Thanks for replying to my earlier message. I am just using the height maps that get generated by the "Get Textures" button click for Substance, so do I need to edit those and modify them in some way? They are defined as Alpha 8 types in the Import Settings. The thing I'm finding is that when I set my detail textures to a small enough scale (5 UV scale) to look decent, a pattern is forming in distance terrain. See the image below. If I set the Extrusion Reduction amount to 0, the pattern is really obvious, blending the snow with the cliff textures, and the image below is actually with a value of about 0.85 reduction. It is visible unless I increase the details textures scales to something like 30 or 40, but then they are stretched, and viewing them up close is very pixelated. Am I doing something wrong? Do you have any tips?

Thanks,
Chris


EDIT:
Let me clarify some things. I have tried using the UV blend scale/val to correct the pattern and also by re-creating the textures with varying parameters to try and reduce visible scaling, but I haven't really done this before.

It seems the opposite terrain shouldn't really be showing the details textures at all, maybe just should be showing the color map when I'm far away from it, but as I zoom into the terrain from far away, it starts tiling immediately.

I have just found that maybe SuperDetails will help make closeups better so I can increase the scale of the textures to remove the tiling effect. I tried using SuperDetails earlier, but I couldn't get it to do anything, will take another look.

Also, I noticed you say to use a Global Normal map with perlin noise to help reduce the tiling. I've been using the normal map produced by World Machine from the terrain, so I'm reading that I should just create a random noise (perlin) map and try that.

2nd EDIT:
Okay I have been playing around with the super details now and see how they work. The part I was missing was the scale factor that scales the global normal map down and also that my normal map was the terrain normal map, so I replaced it with some evenly distributed perlin noise, and it looks much better. I was also able to reduce the splat textures back to a scale (UV) of 10 and setup the global normal map scaling to reduce the patternization. It looks really good now, and I only have 3 textures being applied, looking forward to adding some more to spice it up even more. Feel free to clarify any of my questions if you wish, but I think I have the hang of it now.

Thanks,
Chris

 

Hey Chris, a little tip i can give for the heightmaps: If youre heightmaps are good, you dont need to use the layer reduction at all... with B2M its sometimes hard to get the values ranging from 0 to 1 which would be ideal(at least for the maps that have the biggest differences in height). generally its good to have the cliff/rock textures levelcorrected to use the full range(0 to 1 - pitch black to full white) some other textures may be in the medium grays(i.e. grass, dirt, sand). you hav to think about what you want to achive but if you like the grass, dirt or sand to show up in the crevices of the rocks, what i describe above should be good. i had very good results even without uv blend... using 8 layers in one pass you can have for example 3 types of rock/cliffs, 1 type of stones/pebbles, 1 dirt texture, 2 types of grass, and 1 sand texture. With that you can have so much variety that uvblend really becomes optional

Other tips: The global colormap is very powerfull, use it! The same is true for global normal or perlin normal...
RTP may seem complicated at first to people who dont know what the techniques are meant for, but actually its VERY convinient once you know... and Tom is working on highly detailed Docs, so in the future it will be clear also to new users!

Good luck with RTP and if you got to know it, write a review and rate it at the asset store. It's in our interesst that Tom is successful with it (i for my part want him to keep pushing the boundaries more and more, and he has already proven that he can really do it).

Peter

 

@supernat,

Your screenshot looks a bit as it would use too "flat" heightmaps - transition between "grass" at the left and grey mountain rocks look like classical transparent. Maybe try to push more contrast on heightmaps as Peter suggested. Remember that when you manipulate heightmap it's not applied to RTP shader before you reapply it to height texture slot in layer settings (put none there and heightmap again so RTP inspector knows that something actually changed to "new" - the same for normalmaps if they change). UV blend with option "only at far distance" in RTP LOD manager is quite OK for waht you'd like to achieve. Maybe use more perlin normal on rocky layers. Global normalmap - yes - it helps to hold detailed terrain relief with low poly mesh (high pixelError), but the best is global colormap - for static directional light it can make your scene looking 5x better. You can also bake lighting info into this (so you don't need to use global normalmap) !

Tom

P.S. I'm working on pdf docs now, eh... page 17 and still it seems like beginning of what should be described... .

 

http://www.stobierski.pl/unity/RTP.pdf

ATB, Tom

 

Fantastic!!

When will RTP3 be released on the Asset Store?

 

It's ready to submit, but first I'll do "getting started" video tutorial tomorrow. The time AssetStore will revise this update we'll probably be ready with at least beta version of demoscene. So - I hope friday ? (depending on AssetStore staff)

Tom

P.S. Today I put some final touches in package, so docs also changed. Anyway - link above will be always the same and will be alwast newest docs version (because I guess I'll polish it as users will ask something).

 

Very nice and professional documentation.
I'm happy to have chosen this tool. I can't wait RTP3.

 

Thank you,

A credits from such a hi-level artist you are even more plausible . Meantime I've changed pdf for even better look and style (the same link -will be always there).

I also worked hard on first-steps video tutorial which is now available on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJOn8SJ4zAI

However I couldn't finish submission before weekend (hopefully tomorrow I'll submit and will be revised next week) - so sorry for anybody awaiting. But that's not that bad - you still can get it for $50 and get RTP3 free update.

Moreover - important statemet:

$65 for RTP3 will be only introductory price as I realized that it's still underpriced for value user get (not only terrain shaders with a lot of options, but for example bonus water shaders independent from terrains, or voxel terrain shader)

To be reliable - I won't change it aburptly now, but in a time I'll raise the price even higher so it reflects better real value of the product.

ATB, Tom

 

This really looks awesome and i plan to purchase V3 as soon as it's out!
Maybe this was already answered, but this this require DirectX? Or does it all work on Mac/Linux as well?

 

DX9, DX11, openGL, GLES (can be compiled but can't tell how fast it would behave on specific hardware), flash (but not all RTP features available then)

And now ladies and gentelmen:

Thread closed - moved to RTP3 official thread here