Terrain Composer2 a next generation GPU powered terrain tool.

I use Terrain Composer 1.5.20 in Unity 5 and can't get it to work.

And the version check;

 

Hello Nathaniel,

This Terrain Composer looks very interesting.
Maybe I can use it for a new race type game. I have some questions:

If I need to model an island of 4 km x 4 km, what is the size of the finest voxel details?

Can I sculpt the landscape by hand?

Can it use the textures from Substance (procedural texture generation).

Can I define the location of mountains etc using some template or mask file?

Is real time changes/destruction possible?

How much memory is needed for a 4 km x 4km island?

Can tessellation be used to give rocks more details?

 

Hi Nathaniel,

Do you have any documentation on the erosion filter seen in this screenshot:

http://www.terraincomposer.com/heightmap-erosion-filter/

I've been searching about but I can't seem to find anything relating to this ?

David

 

Hello,

I was waiting for them to be on the Asset Store. Now it should work...

Nathaniel

 

At first I saw that pink trees but after re-downloading the example assets, it works flawlessly now.

 

Hello,

TerrainComposer uses standard Unity terrain. Everything that works with standard Unity terrain will work. So sculpting by hand can be done with the Unity terrain brushes, realtime changes and destruction get be done if you look into 'TerrainData' in the Unity documentation.

The heightmap resolution you can choose and is independent of size. The limitation is performance, but Unity5 can handle high resolution heightmaps. In Unity4 you can use a 4k heightmap which will give you 1 meter per pixel. In Unity5 you can even go higher.

Yes with TerrainComposer you can use masks.
http://www.terraincomposer.com/tutorials/
Help Video Heightmap and splat texturing mask

Memory is depending on the resolutions you choose, and you can test this out. E.g. the heightmap data on a Unity terrain is 16 bit. So a 4k heightmap (the heightmap itself) will take 4096x4096x2 = 32 MB.

Substance can be used on Unity terrain, I highly recommend to use RTP and this also allows to use substances on the terrain.
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/5664
Or you can use the free terrain shader Allegorithmic provide:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/2179

RTP can use tessellation on the terrain...

Nathaniel

 

Yes you have to redownload the examples if you downloaded them with TC version 1.52. As for Unity5 I created a new example package.

Nathaniel

 

Hello David,

This is not implemented in TerrainComposer. In the time I was testing erosion algorithms, but it was too time consuming that I didn't futher go into it. Also because it's hard to beat WorldMachine, the program I recommend for making erosion heightmaps:
http://www.world-machine.com/

I made TerrainComposer be able to import everything from WorldMachine for single and multi tile terrains. With WM you can't place grass/trees/objects in Unity, neither can splatmaps be imported. TerrainComposer is needed for this. With TC you can use the heightmaps/splatmaps and destribution maps from WM.

Nathaniel

 

Unfortunately Windows-only.

 

Quote from the FAQ from the WM website:

 

I have no interest in World Machine, but I can imagine someone wanting an erosion feature within Unity because of WM's platform-availability. No harm meant.

 

yeah, sure... wm is really nice though. Nathaniel and i have talked a lot about erosion, its a tricky thing to do it right.

 

I saw this one come by a few weeks ago: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/27389

 

Yes, although thats not what i have in mind with doing it right... Its certainly nice but not like the sophisticated erosion algorithm like from world machine. There is a reason why world machine is industry standard for erosion.

 

I have no problem believing that!

 

Thanks Nathaniel, no problem, I figured it got missed. As always, thanks for the stellar support.

 

Hello,
after upgrade to 1.7 splatmaps color maps grass etc everything based on raw heighmap textures. Are flipped up vertically? (multiterrain mode used for raw heightmap textures)

So bottom right corner is now upper right?

Not sure if it may be changed. From documentation I was thinking that only tiling was changed?
Or it's something bad at my side. I wasn't changing way how I generate these raw heightmaps I hope.

 

Hi eagle! its me again. Just wondering, why my unity keep lagging when I tried to zoom into the terrain? especially when there are lots of trees and other objects (more likely grass rather than rocks). I saw your video tutorials and it went smooth on your PC.

Thank you

 

Hello,

The raw heightmap textures might be flipped, but actually they show correctly now and were flipped before. Do you use multi heightmap files from WM? I added a feature for this in the filter settings, you can enable total flip y to get it as before.

Nathaniel

 

Hello,
I'm generating them myself. I was just checking if it's not a bug. If they were flipped, I will just change my generation of raw heightmap textures. And it will be better state and I will not be suprised when I will need them to edit in some program

Thanks
Peter

 

Hello Peter,

Yes this happens if you exported them with the previous TC version, but they can be easily flipped in the filter settings. I checked exporting and then importing with the new version, and it works correct without flipping.

Nathaniel

 

Hi, I am new to terraincomposer and have a problem with changing the heightmap resolution. In this and some other tutorials its possible to change the resolution of the heightmap after creating a tiled terrain =>

(9:00)
But I dont get it to work, if I rise the heightmap resolution the overall terrain scale grows up and the heightmap position is not correct, have a look at the attached screenshots...

Any idea whats going wrong??

EDIT: also the terrain tiles are overlapping after rising the resolution, with "fit all" under Scale the terrain get its original scale without overlapping but the position of the heightmap is still not correct!

I even tried one of the procedural examples in a new scene => same problem, height resolution change does not work correctly.

 

Hello,

Thanks a lot for telling. Indeed was a bug in the latest version, I uploaded and submitted again to the Asset Store with the fix. You can download the update with the fix in the TerrainComposer Menu -> Help -> Update (version 1.71).

Let me know if it works after importing...

Nathaniel

 

Damn it, this was a rapid push to the AssetStore?! You seem to be a very trusted developer!
It works (again)! Thanks for quick support, I like updating inside terraincomposer.

PS: changing resolutions while creating terrains is a awesome feature

 

Purchased this yesterday. Love it! My only issue is that for the life of me I can not find the button to shift click in the TC UI for RTP to enable the RTP scripts to work with Terrain composer? Is there someone who can help? Thanks!

 

Hi Nurviz!
You activate RTP under Terrain => Splat Textures => open your SplatTextures, shift click RTP, shift click SetAll and it should work.RTP LOD Manager will be added to scene, maybe you have to recompile the shaders...

 

ahhh! thank you very much!

 

Hi Nathaniel,

I cant figure out how to export normal\color map and height map in new 1.7 version. Any help appreciated....

Regards
David

 

Checked out the examples trees looked black with sparckly white leaves..
Quite nice in the right environment.

Am I just been stoopid?

 

Hi Nathaniel,

not sure if I am doing something wrong, but (it seems to be a bug):

- smooth tool is not working correctly: only one tile of multiterrain gets smoothed, even if all is selected. Only the first terrain tile selectable inside smooth tool ( I think it was working in ver. 1.7.0)

- object scale grass objects (global) is reset to 1 after pressing generate

Also I have a few questions:

- where can I find this impressive island demo??

This island is really great! Your website told me "If you buy TerrainComposer this Island example will be included" but I cant find it, there is a island in the start examples but its a different less complex one.

- when using rtp shaders a very handy feature is missing: seperate tiling of splat maps! Is there a way to have different splat maps tiling or is this a limit from rtp? I already tried "independant detail tiling" (LODmanager) but it is for whole terrain tiles only.

- is there a way to load a collection of objects (like splat maps, grass, trees)?

- how to generate those little handy preview pictures of objects / trees / grass?

Thanks in advance

 

Hello David,

It's the same as in the previous version. I made tutorial video's for this:
http://www.terraincomposer.com/tutorials/
Help Video Making normal maps with TerrainComposer (New)

(Colormap is directly exported to image now, you can set the image resolution in TC terrain list -> Local Area).

Nathaniel

 

It's properly because you use Advanced Foliage Shader in your project. You need to set this up according to it's documentation to get it rendering correctly. You can try an empty project with only TerrainComposer and examples and you will see it works correctly.

Nathaniel

 

@MS80 you can download the island via terraincomposer itself. Not sure which menu is under but it's there somewhere.

 

Hello,

- Thanks again for telling. This was a bug. I uploaded the fix for this also to the Asset Store again. You can download TC 1.72 again within TerrainComposer window with the updating.

- If you click the 'F' button in the top of Grass/Details tab, it will unfold/fold all grass settings for each texture. If you change the global scale you notice the scale in each grass texture changes. To apply the changes you need to shift click <Set All>.

- The Island demo is included in the examples. It's exactly the same project, but I cranked the default resolutions down, to make it run fast on low end as well. But you can easily increase the resolutions by adjusting the main resolution slider and increase the tree density by changing tree resolution in TC terrain list -> Local Area -> Tree Resolution 512, Object Resolution 512.

Keep in mind that I could not include the Assets that I'm using in the video, because they are from Michael O's 'Nature Pack' and 'Tropical Nature Pack'.

- Yes you can import/export splatmaps. And you can import/export grass and tree maps, the tree and grass map only work in TerrainComposer.

- To make a distribution map of objects/trees/grass layer, you can duplicate it and change output to 'Color' layer and then have 2 colors, first black and second white and you can export this. The image resolution you can set in TC terrain list -> Local Area -> Colormap resolution.

Nathaniel

 

Hi Nathaniel,

I found it, actually I couldn't find the file\open for layer to choose the normal map prefab. I found it by right click on the layer then File>>Open

Regards
Dawid

 

Thanks for immediate fix and clearing things up! Smooth tool works / grass scale makes sense!

Sorry, my wording was confusing, with collection of objects I meant the "presets". Inside the terrain settings splat map / tree / grass presets can be loaded and saved (f.e Trees_examples.prefab). I was just wondering if there is a similar method for "objects" like stones?

One of my questions got lost:
When using RTP shaders a very handy feature is missing: seperate tiling of splat maps! Is there a way to have different splat maps tiling or is this a limit from RTP? I already tried "independant detail tiling" (LODmanager) but it is for whole terrain tiles only.

 

This is not an issue with Terrain Composer, but is a "limit" of RTP. RTP doesn't let you set different scales directly, but it's not as bad as it might seem if you learn all of the features of RTP. Specifically, you need to look into the UV blend options.

 

Nope, but will try it in its own project...

 

Hello,

Yes in the last TC version I improved the GUI and put some buttons into popup menu. I mention this in the release notes to read page 8 of the manual what has changed.

Nathaniel

 

Placed objects or any GameObject with components you can easily save within Unity by dragging the parent GameObject (in the hierarchy window) somewhere into a project folder. Unity will make a prefab out of it then. You can then instantiate that prefab by dragging from your project into the hierarchy window.

As for RTP having seperate tiling for splatmaps at close distance, would be very expensive in performance. As weasel explains, RTP uses UV blending and with this you can solve the tiling issue. Also it has UV far replace that smoothly replaces the far distance with its uv blend texture. Actually that feature was invented by me and I'm a little proud of contributing that to RTP. With this feature you can get totally rid of seeing tiled textures. The feature is implemented in this video:

As you can see the textures are detailed at close distance without seeing (almost) any tiling and it also looks very good at far distance. So basically there 2 tile settings in RTP, 1 at close distance where all tile sizes are the same. And 1 at far distance, where you can choose different tile sizes. You can see this very good on the rock textures. With that close detail, normally at far distance you would see very ugly repetitive tiling.

Nathaniel

 

Hi there, after importing project to unity5 i got black terrain. Is this known issue?

 

Hello, this is probably because you have a terrain shader in your project like RTP or ATS colormap. You need to them according to their documentation. You can try TerrainComposer in an empty project, and it should works fine.

Nathaniel

 

Hi guys, very in love with the tool!

I came here because I also found the erosion thing, and am super interested on it. I understand that world machine is an industry standard, but 250 dollars is a little steep for a tool that doesnt even integrate into unity (nor the other engines).

So I just wanted to say, please, do look into getting the erosion brush into TC I would love it!

(also here's something made with TC)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/me44ipf1q2b2hkh/Muestra08.png

 

Thanks guys! I know most important RTPs features, just thought seperate splat map tiling would be nice to have, but you are right, its not really neccessary.

Another question:
What is the simpliest way to get the splatmap number (weight) the player is standing on? I would like to play different sounds while walking over sand, grass etc.! Just need the "measure tool" under the player

 

I want to get worldmachine for things like erosion and adding details to heigthmap, worldmachine is available for 99$ if you can go without tiled terrain = one single heightmap. But I think one huge heightmap (2049 or 4097) is enough and best practice with unity and terraincomposer?!
What do you think, does worldmachine standard matches unity and terraincomposer high level terrain or would you go for worldmachine professional??

 

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/14998/how-can-i-perform-some-action-based-on-the-terrain.html
This should get you on track...

 

yes, afaik you can render out 8k maps in WM standard, which you can split in photoshop... 8K in total is definitely enough.
I've done quite a lot of work with WM and never needed multi tiles. Only 2 cores for rendering are the biggest drawback of the standard edition. But if you accept that the renders take longer you are good to go with the standard version. I don't know for sure but i think it should be possible to upgrade the license to pro later. Maybe look at the WM forum to check
And yes, its better to keep the number of terrains low in unity, performance wise.

 

Thanks @Becoming!
Then I will take the standard version, 8k is definetly enough! Good to know that you never needed multi tiles...
2 cores for rendering maybe slow, but I can accept this!

 

Hello,
I can see through the terrain when i build the game, but in editor (scene/game) everything is perfect, any idea why and how to fix it please ?
Also sometimes i can see a very small gap between the tiles, it is noticable, how to fix that please.

Thanks

 

I just imported TC into a rather large project and I'm getting some kind of value corruption in the editor. See the weird numbers below:

Have you seen this before? All drop downs and lots of text fields have these random numbers. When I import TC into a clean project it's fine, but I can't seem to get it to work in this project. I haven't seen this behavior any time before in this project though.