Farfarer is a genius: triplanar projection on built-in terrain

Boom. No more stretching. Shader courtesy of Farfarer, of the forums.

Here's the latest version, Farfarer updated it to include 2 passes, so you can have 8 textures!
http://www.farfarer.com/temp/triPlanarTexture.unitypackage

 

And now....where is the shader? I mean it will be shared or not?

 

I like it and want to know more too.

 

Here's a package he put together for me, so you can see how to set it up. Very simple and also supports normal and specular maps.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14673841/triPlanarTexture.unitypackage

 

Oh wow...thanks man...you too Farfarer .....

 

Nice!

Thanks for sharing!

 

oh...it didn't support lightmap and ambient light?

 

Balls, I forgot ambient light

I'll add that in, watch this space.

 

Looks very good. Any thoughts on combining this with the other shaders that add bump-mapping to terrain?

 

It is actually already... both bump and specular maps.

 

http://www.farfarer.com/temp/triPlanarTexture.unitypackage

Version with ambient and vertex lights.

Will add lightmaps later, not got the code for that to hand.

 

@Farfarer : Why not using surface shader instead rather than vert-frag?

 

Someone give that man a medal!

 

Btw...how many texture limit for terrain actually, is it only 4 layer (with difuse,bump,spec map in every layer)?

 

rea:

'Cause Surface Shaders suck for complex stuff.

Also, yes 4 distinct layers with bump/spec/gloss/normal. Controlled by the terrain's regular painting system.

 

Will definitely be checking this out, thanks!

 

im sorry, i dont get it clearly, instead of using single texture for the terrains, this package allow us to use Parallax Shader to the terrain?
and also, is it able to intergrate with http://insidious.pt/#amplify

 

Updated package - now converted to a surface shader so it'll handle lightmaps and such like;

http://www.farfarer.com/temp/triPlanarTexture.unitypackage

schizzore;
No parallax shaders.
No virtual texturing, either. For that you'll have to use a bespoke mesh, rather than a Unity Terrain.

 

sorry for my lazyness, after reading now i know, this is a great package, thanks for sharing

 

Updated with up to 8 textures blending together.

Each texture has it's own tiling parameter now, too - rather than one for all of them.

Custom script inspector added to make things a little easier to set up.

http://www.farfarer.com/temp/triPlanarTexture.unitypackage


By the way, if anyone knows how to directly access the terrain's materials, I'd be much obliged. At the moment it's all global varialbes so it will only work properly with a single set of 8 textures (across as many different terrains as you want).

If I could get to the material it uses, I could set it up to have a fully custom set on each terrain object.

 

Excellente Presidente! And the look that Legend411 is able to get out of this is fantastic (see http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/70252)

 

going to try it out right away!

 

i got something wrong going on. this is what i get after i unpacked the package.







if i move the camera far from the terrain it looks fine.
if i start getting closer with the camera, as soon as the resolution of the terrain goes up, these black areas appear.
and one of the textures becomes a gray color.
*it seems to black out totally surfaces that are parallel to the camera. (like in the last image)

some info:
my terrain is
100x100 in width
50 height
1024 detail, base map and height resolution
512 control
8 detail per patch

 

Doesn`t look much healthier here. I get a flat colour where the texture should be. Does this pack require Pro?

EDIT, nope, i just need to raise the texture tiling. Default 0.1 is a bit too small. Really great script

 

Won't require Pro.

Not sure what's wrong, it works fine here. I'll look into it tomorrow.

Sorry dudes - will fix asap.

 

I had to delete any textures already applied to my own terrain. Try that.

 

Hmmm... it doesn't modify the textures applied to the terrain already.

It picks 'em out to show you them in the inspector, but it doesn't do anything with them.

Very strange.

 

I have toyed a bit around and found a few more issues. Just in case you have some spare time left

First one is obviously a projection issue. Some of my faces receives a by a too flat angle disorted UV mapping. See picture. Is there a way to adjust the projection angle? Or is this a limit of the method?

Second one is that it doesn`t want to work with more than four textures really. See picture 2. As you can see, the fifth texture does not display. And i get a black seam where it should blend.

Third thing i noticed is that it has an update problem. I need to click at the terrain that the changings gets applied. Which leads me to issue four. At one point it stops updating. No more changings possible.

I have also a question about the Specular / glossy part. There is no specular map applied. But my terrain is showing specular effects than there would be a white image applied. Means full power. Shouldn`t the specular effect be zero without a specular map?

I hope i don`t bug you too much

 

The default spec/normal stuff is now fixed.

The update thing... I'm not entirely sure about. I'll look into it.

The black border around the 5-8 texture layer I'll look into, too. It's (I think) something to do with the spec/gloss being multiplied out based on the blending and resulting in really darkly lit areas around the blend.

Texture stretching may well be a limitation of the method. I've not come across anything that's too bad but it could be the order I'm blending stuff back together.

I'll get an update out in a few hours - can't work on it 'til my lunch break

 

Take your time. It`s done when it`s done

 

Mostly it's all sorted except the strange dark border on the second pass (layers 4-7). Not sure how/if I can get around it without some odd side effects. It'll need some extensive twiddling

I've also discovered I screwed up the tangent space when improving the blending so I've fixed all that up now and shading/highlights should work correctly again.

 

This is a sweet script Farfarer. Very impressive.

 

Package has been updated.

Now applies default textures if you don't supply a normal or spec texture.

The blending issue is still there between the first 4 and second 4 textures... I can't get rid of it completely but I've tried to minimise the effect as much as I can.

Tri-Planar Terrain

If you want a cheaper version that only does diffuse maps (but no blending artifacts between first and second 4), get it here;
Tri-Planar Terrain (Diffuse Only)

 

Yeah, Farfarers daily builds

 

first of all, thanks for this awesome shader! cant wait to use it for real!

now to the problem.
downloaded the latest version, created a new project and opened the scene that comes with the package.
played around with it a bit to try to find out whats up with these black areas.

it creates this black area on any polygon that is facing -X ( in a 180 degree range)
if the map is flat (all polygons facing +Y) no black areas appear


basemap dist. set to 2000


basemap dist. set to 0
**pictures with ambient light only

so a couple of details:

this black area is not affected by lights (lighting, shadows, rotation)
its not affected by ambient light or fog
it doesn't matter if u have textures or not (deleted all 4 textures that come with the scene)
as soon as i delete the script and shader folders, it comes back to normal.

 

I'm stumped, works fine on my PC.

Have you tried hitting Play and see if they go away?

 

Are you on a Mac, frem? I remember a similar issue with werewraiths tri planar shaders on macs for whatever reason.

 

@framachuca Did you maybe forgott to set normal map and tiling under normal/specular maps?

 

Those values should default out, janpec.

It looks to me like some kind of graphics card issue :/

 

Just opened the default scene on my Macbook Pro and got to agree, Farfarer is a genius!

 

I'm getting the black on my macbook pro

 

yeah, im on a macbook pro. my graphic card is a geforce 8600m gt 128mb.
the black areas continue even after hitting play. ;(

 

Some people had the same exact issue with werewraiths triplanar shader on older MacBooks, I doubt that is a coincidence

 

Ergh, I'm not sure what to do about that. I've not got any Apple things to test on.

How was the other triplanar stuff fixed on Mac? Anyone know?

 

He didn't, he just has on the asset store description "only for windows", hehe.

 

Oh, that's cheap, heh.

I may have to take the same approach.

I'll look into it more later, really gotta get back to my own stuff for the time being.

 

No issues on my Macbook Pro, but it has the old ATI X1600 graphics board which may be why.

 

so maybe its something with mac + geforce?

hope u find a way to get around this little problem! only being able to use the shader on windows will definitely limit
its use, specially on a multiplatform engine like unity!

 

Out of curiosity - does the same thing happen if you try it with the "diffuse only" version?

There's not a lot I can do to fix this as I have no Macs to test it on :/

 

on my macbook pro with geforce graphic card, the black areas appear even if using the diffuse only package.

now, i tried both packages on my mac pro with a ATI radeon card, and NO black areas!

so maybe its really something with geforce cards + mac?

ill try to test the shader out on some other macs, and see if i get any new results.