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Feedback The Issue with the New TERRAIN Tools

Discussion in 'Editor Workflows' started by Flow-Fire-Games, Jun 28, 2019.

  1. Flow-Fire-Games

    Flow-Fire-Games

    Joined:
    Jun 11, 2015
    Posts:
    305
    Hey,
    So I did not find any forum for the Terrain (apparently its not that important?) nor any thread about the recent version so I write here.

    The new Terrain has much greater modeling capabilities but all this is worthless if you can not make a proper terrain shader and have to rely on an very simplistic unity shader that allows exactly one way of doing things that breaks if you require anything below surface level.

    Please, Unity learned the lesson the hard way over the last 10 years. People complained about the standard shader for years until assets emerged. Unity got branded as cheap engine. Are we really going to go another 10 years with a 2005 era terrain shader preset until someone realizes "We should really allow non-specialized graphics programmers (which you would start hiring around a team size of 5-10 people) to make their own terrain shader"

    Please don't give us new amazing terrain but then force me to work with fixed imported terrain meshes because the entire terrain ecosystem is severely crippled by a fixed shader.
    Every professional studio who ships games will require a custom solution, just like no real studio uses the standard shader. (And no person using the standard shader does channel packing..)

    Please give us a way to create a terrain shader with shader graph like it is possible in Unreal since the Unreal 2 days and stop this patchwork of incompatibility.
     
    Last edited: Jul 4, 2019
  2. Flow-Fire-Games

    Flow-Fire-Games

    Joined:
    Jun 11, 2015
    Posts:
    305
    Just to re-iterate on the standard shader issue:

    Does the new standard shader & terrain shader look good? Yes
    Are they usable in a real production environment below surface level? Definitely No

    The reliance on a standard shader instead of a node based system ala shader graph brought many years of users having terrible shaders and damaging unitys reputation, then multiple competing standards out of necessity in paid assets, a severe lack of learning resources for those, content creators who have to split their focus on which options to teach, and now a divide between shader graph and multiple others. Unreal set for one system that is compatible throughout and unending learning resources which are usable throughout, going back to unreal 2 and as such is infinitely superior as a format (connected to everything) and in features. Not even the cooperating studios in the recent unity blogs did want to use the unity shaders and had to write their own, which is a terrible and slow iterative practice as programmers are not artists and need to waste 2-5x the time for 2 people together to get something half as good.

    TLDR: This Patchwork approach of the default/terrain shaders in unity is extremely unhealthy, heavily outdated and limited before it even releases, and should be avoided at all costs, accepting shader graph as the new one system.
     
    Last edited: Jul 4, 2019
  3. DGordon

    DGordon

    Joined:
    Dec 8, 2013
    Posts:
    648
    I thought we can create our own shader using shader graph, put it on a material, and assign that material to the terrain? I'm not arguing with you ... I just don't understand what you actually want vs. what we can do, which means other people might not either.

    In fact, I'm pretty sure I saw in another thread asking for POM / displacement / etc to be built in, a Unity dev mentioned to a certain extent they want to leave it up to people to implement their own custom terrain shaders since users can put whatever data they actually want into the packed map.