The New Terrain System Questions

I just read the blog post at https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/10/10/2018-3-terrain-update-getting-started/
Amazing work and information!

However,

One thing I'm curious about, is technically two questions I apologize.
Question 1: Is there a built in way to handle height information for textures? So we can like, protrude rocks on surfaces, etc. (Parallax/Tessellation, etc.)
Question 2: If not, will this be made in a way that we can modify the shader to put this? Or is it some hard coded shader that we can't modify?

Thanks.

 

No, have to nag HDRP/LWRP team to update their shader.

 

The terrain layers that hold the textures/normals also has a new mask texture

The default use for the channels in the documentation is this.

R: Height - used when doing height based blending
G: Smoothness
B: Metallic.

But as it gets passed to the shader any shader could have its own data in the mask texture.

If you want to make a custom just duplicate the unity standard terrain shader, rename it and do your changes.

 

Thanks mate, didn't realize there was documentation for it yet, I just downloaded the beta yesterday again hoping to have new terrain in it, wasn't so didn't even think to check if docs existed for it yet.

 

The new terrain is in the beta.
If you look at the inspector there is some new paint tools, also on the settings "tab" there is an instancing checkbox to get the new GPU based rendering.

 

is there a spesific format needed or could you add a RGBAFloat texture to the mask and pass more data?
The shader would of course have to know this and decode.

 

That's strange, it did the standard purple not supported thing, was there another update today or something?

 

Awesome! Gonna check it out now! Thanks so much mate! Height maps aren't extremely important for my current game, just thinking of future stuff. I mean, is there some real technical issues with supporting parallax maps and such? Seems like it should be just as simple as any other parallax map, I've made plenty of shaders in the past, but it always stumped me to why on terrain it has to be much more complicated in general, like the few assets that do support it (for the now old gen terrain), it was only specific slots that supported it, not all of them.

 

It was the shader that came with it that turned purple.
I honestly didn't even look for options, just figured automatically it wasn't supported yet lol.

I see the options for it now, ticked the instance thing and the purple went away, it did however go invisible. Just assuming gotta check the docs out and just mess with it a bit...

Appreciate it everyone! So excited


EDIT: Yeah I can't seem to figure out how to remove the invisible mode.

I created two new layers, put an albedo and normal map on each and add them to the terrain, even trying to paint, I see the brush, just nothing is visible.

 

a) Does terrain shader building will be supported like in unreal by graphs? So devs could build terrain shader in shader graph? --> Layered material node, layered blend etc... This would give alot because we could change whole meaning of each layer/material in shader. Epic features would comes from users creativity and they would be able to set any feature to any layer themselfs.
b) Does terrain will support shared material --> baked array so in fact it would support every amount of layers in first pass.?

 

Somebody has to ask:

1. Holes in Terrain?
   
2. Caves?
3. Terracing (sometimes it actually is desirable)...don't make it impossible?
4. Export / extract terrain collision data for use in server builds?
   
5. NavMesh Enhancements:
   • Auto-generate Navigation Areas from terrains based on textures so we can assign costs?
   • Ability to paint, or mark off with polygons, Navigation Areas directly onto terrains so we can assign costs?
   • Improved Agent performance on terrains?

 

@ChrisTchou : One thing actually, how is the performance for terrain destruction in runtime? Such as, putting a crater from a nuke or an asteroid kinda thing. (Obviously not a million miles big), but ya get my drift.

Being we're talking about features, a simple feature to do just that might come in handy, not just for that sort of stuff, but perhaps for people who want to make level editors for their game(s). A runtime terrain editor would be nice feature (obviously that can be done later down the road). I'd rather this be very performant and have the real necessary features now.

Appreciate your support mate! (Perhaps you can make this an official post for new terrain system) to post help questions here, I didn't see any, that's the only reason I made a new one.

 

@ChrisTchou - we're using Houdini's new workflows at the moment - just trying things out.

One thing that would be totally beyond valuable is the concept of actual layers of height, so we can do broad changes with the unity brushes, then finer work on other "height" layers.

Or we could paint big broad changes on height A, finer local changes on height B and import some kind of erosion on height C.

And being able to pick the order of these, and the blend mode like photoshop would be incredibly empowering. So often when painting a terrain, you erase the local changes when making big moves. This would easily fix it and is a common workflow shared among most painting packages and even zbrush in kind.

(Also using the word layer for splatmaps wasn't the clearest terminology...)

 

On a headless server I need an accurate collider that I can raycast against and that can use physics materials to interact with server-side rigidbodies in simulations. Nothing visual but it would be derived from a normal terrain and exportable to a separate project that may not have the original terrain. A scene in a server project / build only needs NavMesh and colliders...no mesh renderers.

 

I know that Terrain's improvement work is at the beginning but I want to ask one thing, does Terrain's vegetation system (specifically grass and details), which overloads too much, have plans? Like the same as the GPU Instancing of Terrain Core?
Another one I would like in the future is to be able to make shader modifications or create a custom shader (HDRP) in the same way that we modify the build-in shader, things like TextArrays. CustomTextChanneling, ColorMaps, Wetness, Anti-tiling ... which are usually more individual features for projects but can still be implemented by dev from changes in the shader. I say this because I have my custom terrain shader in the old pipeline and would like to reimplement it / update it in HDRP but still get my features.

 

I would like the max Detail Distance larger than 250, like 500 or even more.

 

Hey . maybe you can help me . I have updated my asset on the store ( TerraPainter ) to support new Terrain Layers and users are happy. So, great work.
I am creating few features using the capability to expand the terrain painters. and i need to take a look to a shader that i cannot find either in GitHub source code either in separate shader download on beta dowload page. I understand from the code that unity editor load few resource from an asset bundle. I am refering to the shader called
"s_CreateBrushMaterial = new Material(EditorGUIUtility.LoadRequired("Brushes/CreateBrush.shader") as Shader);"
Hope you can address me
Thanks

 

Suggestions:

Allow Multi-select tree paintbrush! So you can paint multiple types at once (other engines have this). This is useful for creating patches of random plants trees. This should be quite easy to do!

Allow user to set the resolution of the billboard texture for all the trees so that it does not get really pixelated when you add 10 trees or more when in the distance.

 

This is also usefull when you got big and small trees/plants. Small tree doesn't need full resolution.

 

@ChrisTchou any plan to also add errosion brush/Tools in it? would be pretty use full to have it

 

A few years ago i made a feedback post about the terrain mesh structure; i want to take this opportunity to ask again if someone from the new terrain team could look into allowing this : https://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/terrain--better-triangulation
edit: apparently the links are dead. This is the referenced post: https://forum.unity.com/threads/terrain-bad-subdivision.166891/

 

i updated the post, but that would be even better

 

In my previous request (to HDRP team, wrong place) - I asked for 1 layer, a primary later for pixel displacement. There is never a good reason to sample 4+ layers for POM, just a single one. 4 would actually probably result in ugly rendering as well...

Ideally you apply it to your rocky or most busy layer only.

 

Please do, now is the time for these changes. Also, you can use Material Element or other logical similar phrases. It's not out of beta yet, so please do the right thing.

I promise I'll spend a few months guiding people who are lost for the transition if necessary

 

Thats why at unreal it's an option in layered material to check it as shared. This means that high end stuff could use it, but mobiles etc still could work on normal pipline.

 

Big congrats that finally after so many years terrain updates are coming up.

I probably start with small things like bugs . There is currently one bug which I keep facing every day. Built in tree billboards are not updating lighting when directional and ambient lighting changes. Billboards only gets updated when camera starts rotating. I guess, quite easy fix would be to check if there are directional lights in the scene and if their rotation or intensity has changed. In such case, refresh tree billboards.

Also if somebody is building a list of remaining features, a good resource could be the previous forum thread, which is now closed: https://forum.unity.com/threads/official-new-terrain-system.255232/ . Through over 4 years there are enormous amount of ideas. Some of them are probably already overlapping but there are also quite a lot unique ones as well.

Was it also considered using the new Package Manager as most of the new Unity's features are coming through there and they allows packages to be less bound to the main release cycle? But I guess now it's quite good that it goes directly to the engine until the terrain core will be updated, cleaned and refactored .

Once again, big congrats on starting up terrain updates!

 

Really happy to see terrain updates coming, also kind of sad to not see anything regarding volumetric terrain. Are there plans to implement volumetric terrain?

Thanks!

 

Unity is aware of it, but it's locked now so people are directed to beta + world building forums.

 

I want to make voxel landscape (youtube.com/watch?v=B3GoyGlWLFc) and adapt to the new system Terrain technologies such as" marching cubes "and" dual contouring" Is it possible? Or you will have to write your Terrain system and Terrain Shader?

 

Hey Unity,

Thanks for the needed terrain update.
Though, I don't understand why the mask for the terrain doesn't follow the mask in the HDRP shader.

Smoothness should be in the Alpha Channel....
First to be consistant and second because there is more precision having it in the alpha channel.

I would really like if all the teams could follow the same guidelines cause it doesn't make much sense.

I really hope that you will normalize all of that, or it will be a nightmare in production do handle the creation of thoses mask if they differ for regular material and terrain material.

Thanks

EDIT: Maybe the quote was from an older documention, cause this one: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ScriptableRenderPipeline/wiki/Terrain-Lit-Shader use actually the same channel. To be confirmed

 

Another thing that you should mention - easy to fix.
ATM - you put objects with LOD's sysem doesnt generate billboards
Would be epic if there will be an option to put billboard from unity as last lod even when you got LOD's. I know there are speedtree and other but... sometimes we want to overwrite it or simply many devs don't know how to build cross/billboard properly.

 

You can already - do it in code or in debug view of the inspector - changing it back to normal will reset it though!

Unity- please fix duplicating terrains too. It does Not work as it does not copy the asset, just the script where you then have two terrains pointing to the same asset which is not what the user is expecting (workaround currently is fixing it again in debug mode).

 

I'm rolling my own anyway, and it never hurt to ask, and we have already discussed why current terrain are bad idea (pole, navigation and out of atmosphere landmark).

I'm still looking at clever pole transition (like having strip of looping quad terrain, and specific terrain for the cap, but how do you transition (coordinate) between the two in a way that make sense?)

 

Where exactly is the shaders for the beta? I can't find the shaders so I can mess with the new terrain shader.

 

Are you using HDRP? Should be included with 4.x

 

Yeah I am... But can't find it. No idea where the 'hidden' stuff is.
I tried searching for 'Hidden' and 'Terrain' in my project, tried also looking for the Shaders download in the archive.

EDIT:
Found it finally.

 

I think spherical terrain geometry could be partially solved if terrain game object rotation would be fixed. In such case if you rotate the game object, to which the terrain component is attached, the terrain would actually rotate. At the moment if you rotate the game object, nothing happens for terrain as terrain normal is always pointing towards positive Y direction in the world.

If terrain rotation would be working, the simple solution would be to generate 6 terrains tiles with different rotations so that they would represent a cube (this would give something like Inception world ). And finally adjust heights so they would follow sphere geometry. In such case none of these 6 tiles would have slopes much larger than 45 deg and heightmap standard wouldn't be violated.

At the moment it looks a bit weird that we can rotate freely game objects with meshes, but not game objects with terrains.

Other options to get towards non-standard heightmap terrains might be solved by making terrain systems more modular. I.e. making it possible to use tree, tree billboard, grass billboard and other systems outside of the terrain. In that case for example the same trees with build-in billboards could be used on any mesh terrain. So this could solve the case of terrains with caves. I.e. users could make their own mesh terrain with holes and also benefit by re-using built-in tree and grass billboards.