Terrain Composer2 a next generation GPU powered terrain tool.

Thanks for explaining . So another terrain tool coming. I checked the video, it looks a bit more like in the direction of WorldMachine. Lets see....TC2's hierarchy on the GPU is another story though...I'm working hard for you guys to soon start beta testing TC2 and I'm really curious about the feedback.

It's a cool idea, although it goes in the direction of manual brushing if I understand you correctly. With TC2 you can make a texture layer and apply it anywhere on the terrain with a mask, and the mask can be a brush. The mask can be made out of many nodes and each node with it's own rules. Kinda what I show in the above screenshot, but it can be done on a tiny area. You can click control-D and duplicate the entire layer GameObject and position/rotation/scale/etc it differently. The advantage of this is that every action is transformable and adjustable and especially it's saved. What happens if you want to use a higher/lower resolutions? You would loose manual brushing...

The terrain follow tool is a great idea. I will definitely add something like this. I think the tool you mean is SnazzyGrid2. Actually I've programmed it...And it can be used with TC2.

What I have in TC2 so far now only is control click the '-' button to erase the nodes and hold shift to clone a node/s when drag and dropping it. Undo is working on everything.

Yes I agree that the Unity terrain brushes should have a make-over, think it's more then 10 years old...There are some Assets for terrain brushing which improves Unity standard brushes...

Nathaniel

 

Yes I did, and it's something that I might add at some point.

Yes I'm pretty exited about it

Thanks for sharing. Ah I know this Asset...Thought it wasn't for free. I will contact the developer about it. I need to be sure that the license allows it.

Nathaniel

 

You can indeed run out pretty fast I've you don't reduce the heightmap resolution and export a huge area. Each chuck of 32 x 32 pixels is 1 transaction and you can use 50.000 in a day. Which means you can export 7155 x 7155 heightmap in a day with one key. That is 48 1k heightmaps which I think is very good. You can create multiple keys though. I exceeded the 50k many times without getting issues. I still use the same 2 keys for 2 years now. But you shouldn't exceed it like 3x or so.

But if you handle it with good care you can export a huge area in a day. I did this one some months ago with my 2 keys in one day:

It's 1000 km2 and uses WC's multi resolution technique.

With TC it's better to create the total amount of terrain chunks you need in 1 go, then the heights of neighbors would be stitched. You can also use TC runtime to stream on the fly in runtime.

Nathaniel

 

Just in general I've found that with terrains, you generate and may play around for a few hours until you get a rough idea of what you want, then focus on a section for a scene (Biome? perhaps) and you often have to finely tune the terrain and or texturing manually to get everything to line up... I'm not even sure this can be avoided at all as image doing roads and a bridge etc... you need to fine tune things.. so yeah these kinds of changes may be lost (ok will) if you hit a generate button that will wipe everything. I'm not sure what the answer here is... if you can omit a selected area from being affected by global change (a mask i guess).. I will have to get test the Beta to say more but I sound like this is already what it can do! It may turn out unnecessary

As for the 'brush' tool I was thinking more along the lines of the manual brush being an adjuster for what had already been generated but not like using Unity toolbar to make changes (which ARE lost as it's outside the asset), so more like a fine tuner that would apply changes to the current layer, so what you did in 3D space would reflect back on the current settings for that layer or mask or section. If that makes sense? Not sure it's the simplest thing to program having it work in reverse I guess.

Strange that I don't recall looking at SnazzyGrid before and it's not the asset I was thinking of but SnazzyGrid looks the part, even better perhaps

I'm not sure i asked yet, but you mention it above.. TC has runtime streaming, but it's not well documented is it? like an extra thrown in? This is something you could really take advantage of and set yourself apart by having an entire world manager.

 

when we place objects its breaking the prefab settings of the objects so unity is running each object as a individual in memory and way to stop terraincomposer objects from breaking prefab status?

 

Instantiate at runtime maybe?

 

You can enable it in TC Menu -> Options -> Generate Settings...

Nathaniel

 

okay might be a weird question we would like some objects to always face away from a splat map is there easy way to make it not face a direction? For instance we like the weathered side of rocks always to face the river splat map

 

That's a bit tricky. You would need a search algorithm that searches for the nearest river splat texture. A splatmap is a texture with 4 channels. So each splat texture uses one channel, if you have 8 splat textures the terrain has 2 splatmaps. So you could get the position of the rock on the splatmap (the pixel where it's at) and then loop around the pixel in bigger and bigger squares to find the nearest river channel pixel. Then you can get a position from that and can calculate the direction.

Nathaniel

 

Hello everyone,

I just updated the front page of http://www.TerrainComposer.com. It has more information about TC2

I started to do some actual testing of creating something instead of programming (and testing functionality) and I came up with this terrain in 5 minutes. So hereby the first screenshots of results with TC2 . It was just a little test. And I'm a bit amazed that it looks so good, I've hiked in the mountains in Norway a lot and it looks alike. Of course it can be done better, but I absolutely didn't spend any time on seriously setting it up (no RTP, etc), just some quick stamping, texturing and grasses with Unity's standard terrain shader. I have Time-Of-Day in the Scene and some image effects on the camera (SSAO and Scion). I'm a bit scratching my head...So 24 hour demo can be made in 5 minutes with TC2...I can't almost believe it...Tomorrow I will show a video

Nathaniel

 

I really like the realism in these images. The first picture from a distance is very realistic. Very nice.

 

I have just had a look at the TC website linked. That's an impressive feature set. Especially looking forward to seeing the GPU rendering at work. The quality of some of these assets on the asset store now is fantastic. I am no fan boy and like the look of UE4, it's a great tool like Unity is but the UE4 store has nothing in these price ranges that are the same quality. I like tools of all kinds and at the moment Unity terrain tools are top class and value for money.

Edit - talking about great tools forgot to ask if RTP integration is still present? Just been learning it now focusing on graphics side of game and learning new stuff.

 

very nice !!!

i m exited to begin beta !!!

 

Great news! TC2 feature set is outstanding, can't wait to get into the beta!

 

Why does terrain composer keep doing this? Its annoying, dont know how to fix it.

 

It's that the generate area is not set to max. You have to go to TC terrain list -> Local Area tab -> Click the 'Max' button, and shift click >Set All...

Nathaniel

 

woot, thanks! Not sure how that randomly happens but at least i know the solution now.

 

Beautiful !

Okay I know what I am saving up for

 

All generated objects are inactive. I can't find the setting for that.

 

It's probably that you have your source GameObject inactive. Or do you get an error in the Unity console?

Nathaniel

 

The source is not inactive. There are no errors.

 

Looks very nice.

(1) Can you tell us what your PC system specification (including GPU) that you used for creating these examples?

(2) What GPUs are you testing against?

(3) Will GPU support be automatic in TC2 or will the user need to explicitly select a GPU option to enable it?

 

Hi Nathaniel,

I'm currently testing your tool in order to see if I could us it in a personnal project and buy it of course.

I want to create a terrain with several heightmap tiles exported from WorldMachine, they perfectly tiles between each others but when I'm importint them in TC they are not :


Maybe you could help me figure out why is this happening.
Also, as you can see, the splatmap out of WM seems off when i load them into TC.

I have some troubles following the TC logic. But if I manage to get good results with TC, I plan to buy RTP and Gaia tools too (some more troubles for me haha)

 

Hi,
maybe silly question. But is it possible to set some y or height offset for generated trees?

Sometimes they are floatling a little on steep slopes. So I'm wondering if it's possible to do it through TC.
I know I can change prefab, but that's not same.

Thanks
Peter

 

Looking forward to TC2, really hope you nail the ease of use down.
Never could quite get into TC1 the UI just was to complex for me to acheive good results even though I've had it since beta.
Being using Gaia these days and finally getting terrain I only dreamed of.
If TC2 can give the same results for the same ease of use, then the time waiting will have been worth it.
Can't wait to finally start making the Large scale environments I've dreams of.

Any update on the preview video.

 

1). I have a PC and laptop, will check tomorrow what exact specs they have.
2). A nvidia 980 GTX, a 780 in my laptop and I have a nvidia 650. Soon I will put TC2 into beta and will get feedback how it runs on other systems.
3). Well you need DX11 graphics card (geforce 430, 405M and up), I might get it to work on DX9 as well. Then there will be also CPU option.
http://solidlystated.com/hardware/list-of-directx-12-and-directx-11-compatible-video-cards/

TerrainComposer 2 GPU works in runtime so you can use it for any DX11 game. The latest games are all DX11 and there's a big market there. PC seems to get more and more strength vs mobile. Of course if your target hardware is mobile you can still use TC2 GPU to actually create the terrains on your desktop. And also everything can be done on CPU side as well in runtime. Then I might also get DX9 to work, but we are already at DX12...

Nathaniel

 

Yes I just made it today and it's uploaded just now

I really looked into making it as simple as possible, yet even more powerful. Think its a day/night difference between TC1. So I'm really curious about you guys feedback...

TC2 has been specially made to handle extremely big environments. With the node window and using actual GameObjects like I show in the video, I think it will be a breeze to learn it and to work with . Also the instant updating, we don't need any visualizers, guessing or have long waiting time to review it in higher resolution or to redo something.

In the video I use a 512 heightmap and splatmap resolution, these are excellent resolutions to see it in good detail already. It's actually on Unity's side that doesn't allow for 2k instant updating, as I have to get the information back to the CPU from the GPU and then convert and assign to the Unity terrain. The updating terrain on Unity's side takes the most amount of time. My part on the GPU runs at 2730 frames with 2k splatmap with the one I made in the video. Then updating Unity terrain puts it to 10 frames (with 2k). Then 2k heightmap takes even a second to update on Unity's side...So Unity terrain has to be streamed in chucks of 256 resolution (doing some benchmarks here give me 240 fps). I hope on Unity's side they can make it quicker...I actually know how to do this easily, it can be instant with no fps impact...But the bigger the data, the slower it gets for Unity. But with my multi-resolution technique we can have massive view distances still . Just need more terrain tiles...

Nathaniel

 

Impressive, looks so much easier to use, glad you took the visualize route. Looking forward to seeing the streaming capabilities of the system.

 

Excuse me Nathaniel,

I have buy TerrainComposer at Unity 5.0.4f
I was follow your video step by step but nothing is working, i was try 4 hour to understand
But i got nothing, only 4 Terrain

and then how to build a big mountain like you do on your video
How to generate mountain and the grass and the tree? Give the tutorial using TC 1.9, I Wanna see the tutor, i used TC 1.9

 

I assume you're trying the perlin noise. Or you import a heightmap? For the perlin noise it's the second question on troubleshooting:
http://www.terraincomposer.com/troubleshooting/

Nathaniel

 

@eagle555

Thanks for the GPU information. Will there be a method in TC2 to share settings between developers? For example I have a setup that works great and I want another developer to use the same settings I have defined in TC2 without having to go through all of the manual steps.

 

Yes just can just turn anything into a prefab by dragging and dropping from TC2 window in your project like I show in the video and export as an Unity package. Then in another project it can be imported and just drag and drop it back in TC window, it loads instantly...The other developer would also need to have the resources that are used, like the heightmap stamps. It' also possible to do everything with procedural noises (perlin, billow, multi-fractal, vonoroi, etc), then those stamps wouldn't be needed.

Nathaniel

 

Hey Nathaniel, I watched the video. Being able to watch splats and heights in real time looks extremely useful! Wish I had that a year ago =] Would love to see some basic tree and object layers being added and a bit more about the node/view inspector relationship. I also say octaves, lunacrity, etc in your noise settings! yay! I only use noise, so the more control the better.

1. You mentioned everything is in world space, so good for streaming. Is there an easily found variable controlling the current shift? In other words, the problem with generating big terrains is always going over 15k-20k as I'm sure you know, floating point values begin to break up. Is there already a built in reposition function? I'm happy to write one over it all if not, but TC1 looked like it was going in that direction though hadn't quite.

2. I'm also interested in wrapping the streamer with a save/load checker to see if it should load instead of recreate. Maybe that won't be necessary anymore with the extreme speed it's generating at! Do grass and trees and all move as fast? For example, when a tree has been manually removed, the camera moves far enough away to unload the terrain, then comes back, the tree will be recreated yes? I'm planning to cover that with a load check if the terrain has already been created once and saved, now much easier I think as you've mentioned it's in C#! What are your thoughts on that?

 

Wow! Terrain Composter 2! The video is wonderful and I can't wait to see more. Love the streaming and node system. Looks like a fabulous addition to my tool box and so many capabilities packed into one.

Can't wait to get more information!

 

Yes I only showed a little bit of what was possible. Trees/Objects and grass also update in realtime. I will work on a video tomorrow that will show it with streaming. It will be more demonstration that I drag and drop what I've made and stream it. Want to make something big . You can also create heightmaps with procedural noises, they will automatically be endless. The heightmap stamps can be used to create points of interest on top of the noises, or it can be completely build out of stamps/masks or noises/masks. So many possibilities...

1). Yes I know this issue, the whole world needs to be shifted back to the zero point. I have a global offset for this. And I have a solution for it that ships with TC2.
2). If you use the GPU it won't be needed. As far as I know Unity doesn't have saving terrains build in at runtime. Of course it's easy to do some manual serialization. I will run some tests today on how much trees and grass can be streamed at once...

Nathaniel

 

TC2 looks to be much simpler to use than TC1. I didn't find TC1 to be that complex, but I know that many people have had trouble understanding how it works. Hopefully, TC2 will help those who had difficulty before. Also, the speed at which the terrain updates is amazing; no more waiting endlessly just to raise a mountain slightly . I can't wait until it is released.

 

This is great. I had to use a floating origin solution in my current game, since even going as little a 5-10k from the origin you started to see rendering/shadow artifacts and wiggling objects. It's nice to have a solution that comes with the product.

 

Erosion would be a great addition. I currently work with several tools, including WM for erosion. I purchased Map Magic recently, more to see how the erosion works in a Unity asset and was not super impressed with the performance. Not sure if that is Unity, specifically Unity 5.3, or if it is the fact that it is using CPU...or maybe it just can't handle a 1K terrain, although that seems crazy.

Anyway, that would really set TC apart since so far, no one has been able to do really good erosion within Unity without a lot of issues. World Creator is supposed to do this, but the erosion from WC 1 was not as impressive as World Machine, especially their latest version.

Another thing that is really lacking is the ability to make realistic rivers. Would love to see you do that! I use TC to make masks and create rivers but then I have to take it back into World Machine to make them look as if they fit into the terrain.

 

@eagle555

Hey,

That's interesting
Can you tell us more about that? How this will be achieved? Would it create multiple scenes with separate arrays of detail objects while generating them? AFAIK it's only possible to place objects as standard game objects (which is not cheap on performance side) in the hierarchy (debris, rocks, branches, other terrain detail different than grass) if you don't want to use terrain detail shader. Would it be possible to place a lot of object with this feature? Like xxx,xxx or millions?

I know that Unity is working on instancing pipeline and some type of object arrays but AFAIK it's not available yet. I'm wondering what is your approach and its possibilities/limitations.

Thanks.

 

Indeed truly amazing, the new video looks great! Can't wait to test out the beta

Some really good points. For a really good erosion solution the usage of the GPU is mandatory imo. I started to make an erosion simulation on the GPU a year ago (only flow sim and visualization so far) and compared to a CPU implementation (like TWS) it is just blazingly fast (over 4500 times faster).
A reference of GPU realtime erosion in Unity could be this blog post from scrawk, all fancy stuff is broken (it is VERY old) but the core erosion is working just fine.

And rivers could be made as a sub-feature of erosion I guess. It could calculate the approximate flow of the water on the terrain and either use the eroded results or just read out where the main amount of water is flowing to generate flow maps / stream directions

Just my thoughts. Additionally, are we able to extend the functionality of TC2 with custom nodes/filters? That'd be so awesome, it would open even more possibilities. If not, please consider adding this, it shouldn't be too hard

 

This would be nice, but I would be happy with the ability to create the shape and depth of a river, with curves for realistic banks and floodplains. Something to calculate actual meander-flow morphology for the shape of the river would be nice as well. Currently all one can do is cut a channel in the terrain, either with a mask through TC or Easy Roads or take it into World Machine, which doesn't always translate well in Unity. Often my WM rivers end up too huge in scale or to shallow once scaled for Unity. Of course can make rivers by hand, but in a large terrain that can be tedious.

Of course, with decent morphology tools for the terrain, maybe it wouldn't be too bad.

 

Indeed, this could also be added as a 'quick tool node' (like the nodes generating shapes) through curves you either specify or generate through some parameters. This would be way faster and would give more control +1 for that!

 

I'm looking forward to upgrade to tc2. I am still having this problem, when I created an entirely new object and generated they were still inactive. What should I do?

 

1. Awesome and awesome.
2. Serializing terrains is a bitch yes. I imagine it will be easier and faster to re-destroy things rather than save and rebuild everything.

 

I suggested (in email) a possible way to integrate the spline manager Curvy with Terrain Composer, letting Curvy's control points automatically follow TC's heightmap as it changes in realtime (Curvy can handle control points that move). This would allow things like roads, railroad tracks, power lines, fences, hedge rows, etc. by using Curvy's mesh extrusion. If the mesh was an invisible profile, this could also be used for worn-down foot paths, ditches, canals, and rivers.

I plan to mess around with this on my own once the TC2 beta comes out, to see if my idea is feasible.

 

Keep us posted! I would love to hear how this works out.

 

Is there a specific setting to force randomization and variation?

I am testing out your runtime generator package...From code, I can successfully generate terrains, but each time the heightmap randomization is run, the resulting terrain is always the same, even when I reset / completely flatten the terrain. I also tried resetting the terrain object (flat), then setting a different seed using Random.seed = (int) but that still ends up generating the exact same terrain as the last one. I also tried Random.seed = Random.Range(1,999). There is slight variation when I change around the layer settings using code...from 0.4 to 0.6, for example....the generated terrain is different from the last, but all future terrains are exactly the same...

Additionlly, I looked the provided docs for the runtime but could not find how to set other config....for example, I'd like to generate a terrain similar to the "Island Example" in one scene, then reset and generate one from the "Mountains Example". What's the API for a code-based solution?

I am using the scene that you provided in your runtime zip package.

 

To randomize at runtime you just need to check the random seed and randomize heightmap options. BOTH options are required. Or else input your own seed and turn on the randomize heightmap.

 

I just watched some of this video and I have to say that this is a huge improvement over TC1. I really look forward to trying this out for my project. Being able to see the layers visually and having total control over them is very powerful.

Is TC2 a separate product that will require and upgrade or do we get free upgrades? Also, when do you expect to release it to the store?

 

Indeed an amazing showcase Nathaniel has created for TC2
Concerning your questions, yes TC2 is a seperate product and the upgrade will be $15 in the first week, then higher (see his post).
Don't know when he plans to have it on the store but the beta should be starting sometime around this week as far as I'm informed