Terrain keeps flickering?

Hey guys,

So when I create a piece of terrain, it flickers between dark and light grey generally when I press and release a button or on mouse click. Sometimes it flickers on its own without any sort of input. It happens most notably in the editor, but during runtime it's more of an extremely fast flickering and the darkness isn't as intense as in the pictures I'm including. It seems like something is messed up with the lighting, but I'm not sure. I'd love to solve this issue, because it gets so annoying that I don't want to even bother using the editor, and I really want to get into using this amazing piece of software.

Here are the links to the pictures:



Am I missing a setting or something? Please help!

-jaybles

 

I posted this 2 weeks ago in unity answers. I have not had a response yet but I think this may be of interest to you. I have also filed a bug report for it. Frustrating isn;t it. I am using windows 7 ultimate 32 bit Look under "Base Map Distance for terrain" in unity answers.:

I am using a GeForce GT 430 with directX 11 and shader Model 5.0. I updated to unity 3.2 build 61061. the install went well but when I opened a new project and added a new terrain I got this weird gray box overlayed on the terrain and it took about 5 seconds to go away. I then started to edit the terrain and it reappeared and again took about 5 seconds to go away. After researching what was causing this I found that if I change the base map distance setting for the terrain a graphic representation will display on the terrain and will increase or decrease in size accordingly and will go away after 5 to 10 seconds but again will come back with any update to the view port. I found two possible work arounds for this

1. set the base map distance to zero
2. set the graphics emulation to directx 7 or shader model 1

With sm 2, 3 or no emulation I get the same behavior. This did not happen with the previous version of unity. can anyone else replicate this or is it just me. Or is there some setting to turn this off. its very frustrating to work with the editor when my terrain object goes black when I try to do any editing

 

Ive had this same problem... what fixed it for me was making sure that my terrain name in my hierarchy matched my terrain name in my project window... since for some reason in the hierarchy it always gets created as Terrain, when in my project window it gets created as "New Terrain". Once I did that, the problem disappeared.

 

Thanks for the reply, but I just tried it and it did not help

 

last shot in the dark, probably wont help but once you have them named the same, try double clicking them both

 

Nope, didn't work. But now I have the clipping problem added as well. aaaaaarg!!!!!!!

 

Thanks for the replies. I'll give these ideas a shot and let you know if it worked for me.

EDIT: Well, changing the render settings fixed it for me as well. Very strange. It's worth noting that I have a GeForce GTS 450, so maybe it's an issue with NVIDIA drivers, perhaps? Also, does this mean when editing in one of those two render emulation modes that it isn't going to look very good in terms of quality? I suppose I'll continue using this workaround for now, thanks for the help!

 

The changing-the-name method actually improved the problem slightly for me....which, I have no idea why any improvement would be seen, but I guess that's beside the point. The flickering problem remains, but with less frequency. Running a GeForce GTS 450 just like jaybles169, seems like it could be a graphics card problem. Man....so annoying!

 

I've been experiencing the same problem on my new PC (which has an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460), although it only seems to be occurring in some projects and not others. It never happened before on my old PC which used an ATI Radeon HD 4800 series card.

I have tried disabling shadows, image effects, and fiddling around with Quality Settings but the flickering still remains. Renaming the terrain did not work. Changing the Graphics Emulation to either SM1 or DirectX 7 did seem to work, however that gets rid of the shadows.

 

My team and I have just upgraded to 3.3 and we are all having the same issue. Terrain flickers from grey to white, when textures are painted on the terrain they are only visible at a distance after keeping the camera still. If you zoom in to far the texture disappears. If you go into the game view there is no texture at all on the terrain. Also if you zoom in within a few hundred meters of the terrain it starts to disappear. We have reviewed the project settings and camera settings and have not be able to resolve this.

We are all running Win 7, 64 bit OS with 4xx and 5xx Nvidia cards. We had a similar issue to this back in 3.0 if I remember correctly, and was fixed with the update. We are thinking of rolling back to 3.2, anyone have an idea where to get the old download?

We notice that some of the texture issues are "sort of fixed" with emulation of Shader Model 1 and 2, as well as DX 7.0.

Cheers

 

I found this thread and it sorted out some of the issues: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/78840-Terrain-disappears-upon-zooming-in

The problem of zooming in for me and having the texture disapear as you get close to the terrain still persists. Also the texture does not exist when you play or compile.

Any thoughts?

 

I just change the base editor distance to 0.... no more flickering from light to dark

 

I guess this has to do with the Base Map Distance... messing with this fixed it. I don't know how it randomly decided to change..

 

Had this problem on a helicopter game i was working on and as soon as the helicopter wold rise the flickering wold appear so the easiest fix for me was to set the shadow bias to maximum. So no more flickering but the shadows have no detail now and, to be honest, are ugly.

 

My problem was similar, but possibly related: zooming in and out made the entire terrain disappear. Turns out it was the material warning shown here:


and after changing the material:

 

This is what worked for me:

 

TY so much for that, FIX, soo nice finally to test game again w/o insane flicker ))

 

Very old thread, but I still get this in 2020, with standard pipeline and with URP. I fixed this by increasing the camera near plane in the editor from 0.01 to 0.1.

 

Thank you. I had to set my near clip to 1. Shadows are no longer flickering.