Terrain Composer2 a next generation GPU powered terrain tool.

I'm working through the tutorial 'placement based on image colors'. When I try the 'Auto search' feature to load in the satellite images, nothing happens (in fact the first image I place manually vanishes). The bottom left box has a red line around it which seems mysterious! So I dragged in each image by hand. Then when i shift click <Set ALL> the interface just flashes and nothing happens..
UPDATE. Started a new scene and this time it worked. Still had the funny red line and had to drag the images in manually through..

 

Hello everybody, first of all thanks for this awesome asset, I bought it today and when I generate terrain example, the trees have "white leaf" textures, I found some information on the Internet and they talk about replacing a tree shader, I tried without result (now its default), screenshot attached.

Anybody else had this problem?
Thanks

 

Hello,

I'm trying to get my heightmaps to import properly, but I'm having some issues:

4 x 4 terrains. Heightmaps are 1024x1024 16 in total.

When I import them, it doesn't generate properly, and when I go to the terrain and export its heightmap, it looks to have only imported a sliver of the heightmap.

If, however, I import the heightmap directly to the terrain, its fine.

Thanks.

EDIT:

Thanks to the superb support, I've now resolved my issue. The issue was due to me not setting the Area X and Area Y properly in Local Area when I upscaled my terrains.

 

Sure

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity-5-something-weird-with-trees-alpha-textures.307372/

-Setting the shadow map resolution for each of my trees to match their diffuse resolutions sorted it out for me during play mode. In edit mode the spots are still there. Obviously increasing the resolution just to get rid of some white spots is an expensive work around. Are you sure you replaced the shader correctly? I have not tried that particular solution spoken about in that thread, I assume that's the one you tried.

-Advanced foliage shader doesn't have this problem, but it also requires you to replace the shaders. It gives you shadowed billboards that don't stick out like a sore thumb as well.

 

All of a sudden, each time I load my scene, I'm getting the error "Detail removed: invalid detail layer 0" for each terrain.



Not quite sure why this now happening, and was wondering if anyone could shed some light on it. Only happens on loading the scene, and doesn't seem to affect anything during play.

Cheers,
Taz

 

I get with Mono Develop this error

if i include Terrain Composer to any fresh project without extra assets.
Any solutions?

 

Hello,
I have some ideas for new practical features:

• it would be nice to see count of tree kind (under Terrains/Trees). Count for terrain and total for all terrains would be nice. With this I can get picture of how many trees of some kind I have in scene. To get image how much of performance is taking some type of tree.
• to make believable forest. It's often needed to add very thick trees on edge of the forest. (on the edge tree has much more light, so it grows with more branches with leafes) But core trees inside of forest obviously have much less branches. Because they have less light.

I don't have good way how to do this in TC. I have few ideas. I can probably manipulate input raw heightmaps of forest layer with photoshop to hightlight edges. And than combine these two to fit thicker trees on edges.

Or I had an idea with some final gather on layer. (this final gather on layer would be run on already generated layer. So everything would be on it's place already) And it would have ability to change tree/object to different object based on some criteria. Criteria could be accessed modified via API to TC? Or new criteria based on amount of light on place where tree is?
I think that alone concept of final gather on generated layer would be powerfull feature. To do some final adjustments. For that we need everything already generated.

Nice day
Peter

 

Why it's like this?
I've added Bing key and it shows maps for a little time but now I get this.

 

Thanks for the information, I tried to fix it with that tips but it didnt worked or I dont know how to do it, I fixed it by changing the rendering path property of the camera from Deferred to Forward, the white textures dissapeard but sometimes I can see some small white edge on trees, for now, I decreased the main light intensity and that helps a bit, dont know if this is the best way to.fix this but I didnt found a real guide to fix this, since Im pretty new with Unity.

Thanks

 

I've used terrain composer a few times in the past with no issues, but now I have one that is really messing with me...
I've looked all over the forum, so excused me if this has allready been asked.
I have a large project going that I started on just a plain to get my other things working right first... moved to environment. My terrain created fine in world composer, but now I've moved on to terrain composer I have a large terrain of 49parts.. I can only get 46 trees to be generated ... Its allways 46... I've changed sooooo many settings to try to get the tree density up, but can't find that one I need...
any ideas?

 

oh... one last thing... can the trees be meshes or do they need to be Unity terrain trees?

 

That is very strange, maybe we can do a skype screenshare to see what's going on. My account is Nathaniel.Doldersum

Yes you can:
http://www.terraincomposer.com/how-to-faq/
You have to be careful not the regenerate the splatmap from TC as it will overwrite it. You can create 16 bit raw grey scale images in photoshop, the white color is the maximum height and black the minimum height. Or do you mean somethings else?

No, you have to check in the cloned TerrainComposer.js script if the bool generate is false. You can see the RuntimeTerrains script how to do it (in the TerrainComposer/Runtime folder).

Yes it has changed, as I improved the GUI. You have to right click the terrain label. You can see the changes in page 8 of the TC manual.

Nathaniel

 

The red box means that you have to place the first image Tile1_C1_R1. I changed the order of the terrain tiles in TC the same as WorldMachine is using. It was different before and you can read the change in page 8 in the TC manual. Now I notice that the example tiles don't work anymore. I will make a new example package where I name the tiles correctly.

What you can do is remove the first number from the example Tile name, e.g Tile1_C1_R1 to Tile_C1_R1, then in TC change the naming string to C%x_R%y.

It was a Unity tree shader bug in deferred rendering path, they fixed it in a patch then the next patch I think 5.1.p2 it was there again, now in 5.1.p3 it is fixed again. So you need to download latest Unity patch.
http://unity3d.com/unity/qa/patch-releases

Do you have RTP in your project? It has to do with the splat textures, you assigned a texture the the terrains and that texture is not in your project anymore, so basically an empty splat texture slot.

Nathaniel

 

Hello, sorry I'm a noob to rtp and terrain composer, but is there a way to set splat texture tiling when using RTP ? I noticed that option goes away when you enable RTP. If Terrain composer can't do it, is there instead a configuration in RTP that can change it?

 

I have this error,

 

Hi,
I am testing terrain composer and RTPv3.
I want to use masks for placing the splat maps, exactly as in the island demo video. but it doesn't work.
after setting a first terrain layer on all the surface, adding the grass layer causes it to be rendered black.


I am using Unity 5.1.01f3

 

changing filter setting from Current to Always let masks to work on splats distribution.
now my problem is I have am ugly mega pixel effect, because of the mask. I guess it works only using pure white(yes splat map) or black (no splat). every other value is flattened to white or black.
how to make it no more visible?

 

This error is not related to TerrainComposer. It an issue with Monodevelop:
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/983316/monodevelop-error-after-unity-51-upgrade-an-item-w.html

The first is a good idea, I will add that in the major release I'm working on. The second idea is really interesting, simulation more branches and leaves on the edges would be very interesting, what I often see is that the trees on the edges only have more branches and leaves . It would require the same tree model in more variations. Simulation with colliders and raycasting could work.

I think the diameter of the trees smaller on the edge of the forest, instead of thicker. Because trees in the center of the forest are older as a forest expands overtime from it's center. And the older the tree the more diameter. On the edge of the forest are the young trees.

I explain it here:
http://www.terraincomposer.com/troubleshooting/
I get white satellite images with a no-camera symbol when I export my area.
If you zoom out with the mouse it will probably show again.

You can change the tree resolution in TC terrain list -> Local Area -> Tree Resolution, after changing shift click >Set All. What terrain size do you use? Default resolution is 128, that can create max 128x128 = 16384 trees for each terrain.

You can place trees as SpeedTrees or Unity terrain trees. You can also place trees as objects, but that's not recommended as objects there's no Lod system.

It's because you paint with only one splat texture. A mask is for the paint amount and if that's 0 it will result in space without splat texutre and that will be black. What you need to do is use a first layer that paint 1 splat texture always. Then with the following layers you put 1 or more splat texture and use the masks. The filter output of the following layers need to be on 'Change' and Level -> 'Layer', that will overpaint the previous layers.

I explain this in the how we made the 24 hour demo document:
24 Hour Demo Tutorial document

Nathaniel

 

RTP handles that, you can change it in RTP terrain script -> Main -> Tile size, then you can use uv blending and far away replace.

It might be that your bing key is not correct. There's should be no spaces in there. Was it working before?

If you do it with filter output 'Change' level 'Layer' you should get better results. It might be that you need to higher the splat resolution in TC terrain list -> Resolutions.

Nathaniel

 

Thanks for all your help Nathaniel, and thanks for having patience with all of us.

Next question! Since you and Tomaszek collaborated on RTP and TC, do you have any in-depth tutorial on using them together? Or is the RTP tab in TC all there is to it when using them in conjunction?

 

Do custom textures (where you can blend 2 assigned textures together to create a new one) work with Edge blur? If I turn on edge blur my custom texture turns to something else. If I turn it off, it changes back to what it's supposed to be.

edit: there's no doubt, at least on my project, that this happens. I am applying the texture by color if that matters. It takes custom textures 8 and 9, then replaces them with texture 7, if I have edge blur on, it doesn't matter what radius I set.

 

Tree question here:

I made a tree myself (as I can't see how to make a tree made of overlapping spheres in the Unity tree creator) and now I'm trying to use it as a terrain tree (which is probably the problem, but anyway).

This is shader-related. I am using the Speedtree shader because it writes to the z-buffer, and I need that in order to render my trees on top of the Tenkoku fog behind it.

When I place the tree in the scene manually, the alpha channels do their job and everything is transparent where it should be and opaque where it should be. See below:

But, when I take this same prefab and let TC place it using a trees layer, all of the TC-placed trees completely ignore the alpha channel. See below:


Now, when I use the Unity leaves soft occlusion shader on that same prefab, then all TC-placed trees use the alpha correctly. But, the fog renders on top of them all. (Anyone know how to make Unity's built-in leaves soft occlusion shader write to the z buffer? That would solve this issue, but no matter where I put 'ZWrite On' in that shader, nothing happens.)

Any ideas?

-- Anthony

 

Thanks. It looks like changing that number doesn't seem to do anything but I'll read about RTP to find out about it.

 

shame on me ... the resolution was ok.
my mask textures were bad! ahhahah.
now it starts working.
the only thing missing is the clouds shadows effect (from island demo)... I need to go deeper testing some more.

 

That's what I thought initially, but I went through my Splat textures and they're all accounted for. I checked the splat textures in every terrain (3x3 terrain), but couldn't find anything amiss.

However, on a hunch, I decided to just do a '<Set All>' again on the the splat textures, and guess what? That fixed it! So, something was wrong, but I couldn't spot it Anyway, all fixed. Many thanks!

 

With TerrainComposer you can assign RTP colormap and normalmap textures for multiple terrain tiles automatically. That can save a lot of drag and dropping.
I have a tutorial how to use RTP with TC:
http://www.terraincomposer.com/tutorials/
Help Video Importing from WorldMachine/Using RTP with TerrainComposer

Thanks for telling, yes this is a bug. I will look into it.

Does it make a difference if you place the trees with the Unity terrain tree brush and TerrainComposer placing? Maybe you can solve it with renderQueue on the tree materials:
http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Material-renderQueue.html

Clouds shadows you can do that with a light cookie:
http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/HOWTO-LightCookie.html

Nathaniel

 

I'm wondering why one of the boxes for the splat images is coming up red.

 

Hi Nathaniel,

I just have a quick question regarding TC, is it possible to hand paint splatmap directly on terrain?

I am no noob regarding texture and 3d but the splatmap generation for a complex terrain in world machine is a nightmare and there is no tutorial for the kind of terrain i have.

I lost about 4 days just trying to do it in world machine and my patience is now wearing thin so that the reason for my question since i would be much faster if i can hand paint it in TC.

Regards Peter

 

Hi,

I've been the last few months creating my own "little world" in World Machine and I'm not getting to the point where I want to import it into an engine. I've been playing around with UE4 and while the results are good, there isn't a lot of decent assets for what I want to do ... which is basically import the heightmaps and procedurally generate the textures, grass, trees and so on.

When I say "little world" ... it's currently 2304 2km x 2km tiles. It covers several biomes (including northern forest, temperate grassland/forests, jungle, volcanic, wasteland and probably a "fae" area as well). And I really want to make it one huge seamless world. Ambitious I know, but this really is a labor of love for me.

What I's like to know is:

• What are the limitation on importing map tiles in Terrain Composer. Can it handle 48x48 tiles? Does Terrain Composer handle the equivalent of what UE4 calls "world composition" or do I need a separate asset for that?
• Can I specify separate tiles as specific biomes and still have the world relatively seamless?
• Can I simply import the heightmaps and have World Composer do all the procedural texturing and foliage?
• Can I override the procedural generation and paint/erase specific areas with textures/foliage (making areas of interest).

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. I REALLY like the look of Terrain Composer as it's close to doing the kind of stuff I want. Hopefully it can do all I want ;-)

 

I have a question about terrains for mobiles....is there a tutorial? I tried to follow the 5 lines of information in the manual, but as soon as I convert to a Unity mesh, I get pink/purple blotches all over my terrain.

I know I'm doing something wrong. Here are the steps I take:

1. I create a new terrain
2. Go to Quick tools -> Mesh Convert
3. Check "Save as Unity Mesh"
4. Press Convert Terrain

 

I was having a lot of trouble generating a splat map in World Machine and I found this example that a guy did on the forums. Don't know if your terrain is too complex but It helped me out a lot, maybe it'll help you too.

 

Hi Jarek,

Thank but i already check it and the way my terrain was build with multiple combiners it is impossible to get the same result unfortunately. Their examples are all based on one single terrain.

Regards Peter

 

Have a bit of an issue with procedural terrain generation. I don't know if this is a TC issue or Unity problem, but...

In that image you can see that there's a large flat spot at the top of the terrain, and several for the bottom as well. From moving a little cube around I've determined that the terrain cuts off at y=0 and y=250. Is there a setting in Terrain Composer that will allow terrain to go past these points (or at least, go higher--I understand it cannot go lower)? if not, do you know if there is one in Unity that does it? Thanks for the help.

I tried adjusting the heightmap and basemap resolution, neither did anything.

 

This is for auto search, it the box where you have to put the first image, e.g. _x0_y0.

Hand painting can do done with the Unity terrain brush. TerrainComposer is very powerful in generating splatmaps and it's very quick and easy to do.

As for TerrainComposer there's many things you can do with more splat layers and filters/masks. Also recently I introduced the custom splat feature and the min-max sliders. For the custom splat feature you can mix all the splat textures that are assigned to the terrain and it acts as one splat texture. This way you can make it look like there's more textures being used. For custom splat textures in the layer you need to click the little unfold triangle next to the splat texture and enable custom and then set your sliders.

A basic setup (you can see the Procedural Mountain example for this):
1). Create a splat layer.
2). Put all your splat textures in there. Click the 'R' button next to the 'F' button to reset the mix-max sliders.
3). Add a second filter and put the input to 'Steepness'.
4). Unfold the first filter and enable 'Combine'. This will result in height+steepness = splats chosen, instead of (height = splat chosen) + (steepness = splat chosen) / 2 to blend them together.
5). Adjust the min-max sliders of the splat layer to get the splat textures where you want them.




What is a very good technique to create better variation is to use is to randomize between 2 splat textures. E.g with 2 cliff textures:
1). Create first layer without the cliff textures where you place textures (with only 1 texture of the variation, see screenshot 1).
2). Then add a second layer with filter output to 'Change' and level 'Layer' (this will overpaint the layers above). You can use 1 or more splat texture for overpainting, with more splat textures you can put Input to 'Random'.
3). Now we can use a mask to how much we overpaint randomly, where we put 'Input' to 'Splatmap' and select the splat texture we want to overpaint.
4). Then we add a second mask and put Input to 'Random' to have a randomly overpaint strength.
5). You can do this for more splat textures...

Nathaniel

 

That are good questions.

1). TerrainComposer can handle any amount of tiles, the limitation is the memory Unity needs for it. TerrainComposer can import heightmaps/splatmaps and vegetation maps from WorldMachine. Only TC doesn't stream this can be done with dynamic loading kit.
In this tutorial I import from WM:
Help Video Importing from WorldMachine/Using RTP with TerrainComposer
2). Yes TerrainComposer can generate on multiple terrain tiles and they can still be seamless. You can use masks based on images to create biomes in TC.
3). WorldComposer is for extracting heightmaps and satellite images from the real world. TerrainComposer can do procedural texturing and foliage placement.
4). Yes you can do this with the Unity terrain tools, since TC/WC use standard Unity terrain.

Yes that are the steps, the pink blotches is actually the converted mesh that is placed on top of the Unity terrain. You can drag it a little higher to see. The next step is to create a material and assign it to the terrain mesh. You can use the included mobile terrain shaders from TC (it's a package in the TerrainComposer/MobileShaders folder). I made 2 variants, 4 and 8 splat textures. You can export the splat map from TC (enable 'Splat' and 'Export' button in top of TC window). Then assign the splatmap(s) and splat textures to the material, and you should get the same looking mesh terrain.

This happens because the terrain gets higher then it's size y (can be changed in TC terrain list -> Size tab, that will put terrain higher with same results).
If you put filter 'Input' to 'Always', you can put the bottom part of the terrain up with the position slider. The 'Abs' toggle in the perlin curve also helps. For lowering the peaks you can reduce the filter/layer strength.

Nathaniel

 

But I'm trying to go ABOVE that "size y." I want to make the terrain bigger, not adjust it smaller.

Do you know if that's possible?

Edit: NVM, I tried adjusting size like you mention and it makes the "cap" higher. Thanks for the help!

 

Hi,
This is probably a simple one but for the life of me I can't find it in the TerrainComposer settings.
How do I set the Physic Material of the terrains through TerrainComposer?
Currently I'm generating the terrains in TC, selecting them all in the hierarchy, then dragging the physic material into the Terrain Collider. Is there a way I can do that in TC?

Many Thanks!

Steve

 

Thanks for your answers Nathaniel. I took the plunge last night and bought the package. I have a huge learning curve ahead of me, but it looks awesomely powerful.

Just a quick clarification ....

Great video! It's going to be very handy. I don't suppose there's a tutorial that shows you the processes to create the splatmaps, color maps, normals, etc that feed into this process? I take it that it's better to do that in WM rather than TC?

EDIT: I ended up getting RTP3, but I don't have the RTP preset button in my terrain as per the video. It's there under splat textures, but not terrains. Any idea why that may be the case?

EDIT2: I've managed to activate RTP through the Splat Texture part of the terrain, but I'm now having difficulty generating them. These pictures show what I'm getting.
http://imgur.com/yKmZu77
http://imgur.com/ePsQSQ5

When I try to <Set> the the Splat Textures, I get :
http://imgur.com/U7vVr8C
All the textures come straight from the RTP Textures folder.

Again, any guidance would be appreciated.

 

Thanks for your answers Nathaniel, now i will just stop loosing my time in WM and tackle this in unity and photoshop.

Regards Peter

 

I got a issue using TC on Unity 5.
Exery time i import the asset the "Choose Example" shot me a code like 49736c616e642045786...
If i click on Start nothing happens the Terrain still is flat.

 

Hi,

I just purchased Terrain Composer and Im learning how to use it. I wasnt able to figure out how to paint splatmaps on regular meshes. I have terrain modeled in another application and ultimately targeting mobile, so Im hoping to just paint splat maps on regular geo. (Maybe this was mentioned somewhere on the previous 56 pages)

Thanks for any advice on how to do this with TC.

All the best,

Eric

 

Is it just me... or did my FPS skyrocket using this?

2048x2048 terrain, fully decked out, rocks, trees, 4 textures, water, and I am getting 200FPS in the editor and 30+ on my android tablet.

Awesome.

 

Yea, I got this as well.

Don't ask how I got it to work... but I did

 

Hey, I just wanted to ask, if there is something like dynamic chunk loading in TC. I've tried searching, but it only came up with something on page 4.

 

@webik150, If it helps here's a link to search within this thread:
http://forum.unity3d.com/search/1971443/?searchform=1&q=mesh+splat&t=post&o=date&c[thread]=151365

This feature isn't formally supported by unity forums yet, reply here to let them know if its useful for you.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/how-to-do-search-within-a-big-thread.294514/#post-2216089

 

Thank you so much, this is awesome.

 

One thing I've noticed is that there is no way of selecting color map normal like there is for splats or color maps. Is thre plans to implement this?

 

Can someone give me a hand with this. It's frustrating the hell out of me as I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

I've gone back to the drawing board and recreated my project ... a number of times now. I'm getting horrific tiling in my terrain and I don't know why.

• I've created the terrain tiles.
• I've imported the heightmaps.
• I've assigned the splat textures and color maps (using the RTP button under splat textures. That's the only place where I can find an RTP button).
• I'm assigned the splatmaps.
• I generate the heightmaps and splatmaps and get this ...

(Ignore the bit on the right, that's the tile boundary and the splat generation hadn't got to that tile yet)

I'm note sure what I'm doing what exactly I'm doing wrong. It could be a setting. It could be a step I'm missing. I've tried experimenting with LOD_Manager and usually just end up getting to the point where I end up stuffing up that (getting errors and warnings) and I have to start again. Nothing I seem to do in LOD_Manager seems to change the tiling, so I suspect it's some other setting that I'm not aware of.

Can anyone please help.

 

Hello Tovrin, as far as I could tell, that looks normal. It should be tiling that way. What you wanna to do however, is mix different textures based on some TC settings to "mask" the tiling. It looks like you want grass and rock so an example to get better results would be to have 2 textures for rock and 2 textures for grass. You then "mix" them using TC. You mix them by scaling, rotating and playing with the sliders in the "Mix" section of TC. The placement of the textures in the screen shots look really good, so you just need to mix and you will get better results. You could also add a dirt texture that shows up between the grass and rock transition. Hopes this helps, let me know if you already knew this, or if you need more clarification. As a side note, I've not used TC in several months (6+), so most of this is from memory.

 

Ahhhhh. Thanks BigBite. I thought RTP3 did that for you "out of the box".

Hehe! That's just one small part of the much larger picture. I have a few extra textures covering the whole range of the landscape. ;-)

But as you say, the textures all seem to be in the right places. The heightmaps, splatmaps and colormaps seem to be all working . But clearly I need to play a bit more with TC to get the effects I need. I'm just not seeing the value that the RTP3 shaders are providing yet. Hopefully that will become clearer as I play around more with the TC mix sliders.