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Relief Terrain Pack showcase for developers

Discussion in 'Assets and Asset Store' started by tomaszek, Nov 7, 2013.

  1. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    Hi,

    I've decided to start new thread here, in addition to my product thread on AssetStore section.



    This is intended for artist to show their work results (screenshots videos) of RTP usage. As AssetStore thread might be more technical issues related that you can ask me, here you can share workflow/development/artistic tips among other RTP users.

    ATB, Tom
     
    Last edited: Nov 7, 2013
  2. botumys

    botumys

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    I'm tweaking values for my next scenery.
    This image is a test terrain to adjust bumps and displacements.

    $test_rtc3.jpg

    Lighting test 2:

    $test_rtc3_2.jpg
     
    Last edited: Nov 7, 2013
    jazz75 likes this.
  3. Becoming

    Becoming

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    Wooow! I look forward to see more of it!!! Very nice textures! It will be very interesting to see your terrain compared to the demoscene, as i assume you have an entirely different workflow than me.
     
  4. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    Olivier (Botumys),

    Great work (as expected...). Only one performance question / hint. If you're using deferred rendering - do nothing (there will ba always 2 passes regardless number of lights used). If you're using forward - you can check "No forward add" in LOD manager - this should ensure terrain is rendered using 1 pass and additional lights like your point light on the scene are computed using spherical harmonics. This should improve performance as terrain is hi-poly model and it's best to not render it twice. But honestly I haven't tested it yet and maybe i'm wrong and not _whole_ terrain will be rendered twice but only the smaller area that's influenced by the additional point light (for more directional lights I'm sure terrain would be rendered more times depending on number of lights). You can check this in profiler (drawcalls/tris).

    Tom
     
  5. omarzonex

    omarzonex

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    WoW

    Reality Beautiful

    are you Test web your project !!!!!!
     
  6. botumys

    botumys

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    Thx :) And gratz for the demo, I hope we will see screenshots on unity's homepage soon!
    I think my workflow is almost the same than you (mudbox, worldmachine,..) But, because I work on smaller zone, I like to
    replace cliffs by real 3d objects. And my projects are not well optimized like yours :)

    Thanks Tom, I'll follow this advice and report the results.

    Not a web player, but maybe a pc/mac demo.

    thanks :)
     
  7. Becoming

    Becoming

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    Hey botumys,

    do you have any new screenshots to post? I can't wait to see more of you work and what you can achieve with RTP!
     
  8. botumys

    botumys

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    Not yet, I'm taking the time to adjust layers, tweak values, see how to archive good result near and far.
    I'm trying to use linear mode too.
    I encountered some error with unity upgrade but Tomas kindly answered to my questions and fixed most of them.

    The last thing I need now is a nice cube map slot to add .. cubemap things ;)

    Sorry I can't resist :)
     
    Last edited: Nov 18, 2013
  9. ronan-thibaudau

    ronan-thibaudau

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    I hear unreal engine 5 will suppoert cubemapped terrain reflections, dx12 only
     
  10. lazygunn

    lazygunn

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    But all you have to do in Unity is add a cubemap slot

    unity is the future
     
  11. Becoming

    Becoming

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    Guys you HAVE TO use all FoRmAtInG Options that are Available
    (otherwise its not authentic)

    I could not resist either... but lets get back on topic, to my excuse here a nice pic Nathaniel made with
    Terrain Composer/World Composer and RTP:

    $unityFS.jpg
     
    Last edited: Nov 18, 2013
  12. lazygunn

    lazygunn

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    That's pretty spectacular, if he could release a demo with oculus rift mode i could just float around it for a while feeling special
     
  13. botumys

    botumys

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    This zone + jetpack + oculus and you have a hit :)
    I post again this video to centralize all is made with RTP :
     
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  14. Becoming

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    In the skypesessions with Nathaniel a already saw the Oculus camera controller in the hirachy, so i think you'll be able to make some flights with the Rift :)
    Great idea, i will also look through the hundred of screenshots we made for the island demo and post a few of the best...
    Also, i can't wait to see new stuff from you here ;)
     
  15. lazygunn

    lazygunn

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    I was going to get stuck into rtp tonight and make good with the gametextures.com sub someone else is paying for, for me but I got stuck trying to make that guys amazing ocean thing in the wip thread drive the suimono beta's waves. I might be nearly there though now so whatever I do make with RTP, when I finally do, will have some sweet looking water
     
  16. botumys

    botumys

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    A new test. I changed a bit alpha in maps for heights. Now I can play with target strength to add a bit of stones on grass, branchs on rocks or grass in cracks.. Fun to paint :)
    btw, someone now how to disable the effect on details grass which change color over time ? (billboards or not)

    $praed_test3.jpg
     
    Last edited: Nov 20, 2013
  17. Becoming

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    Hey botumys, you got some beautifuly textures there! That heightblend made me jump of joy when i started to work with it, like you say, painting is so much fun with it! I dont know what you mean with the grass color changing over time... maybe if you explain a bit further.

    For the detail grass placement there is a very nice workflow with Terrain Composer i came up with, you might consider, it gives really great results. I export the splatmap of the terrain and extract the channel that is for the grass texture into a new grayscale texture. In photoshop i do a gradient remap. remapping 30-50% brightness to white, doing the same on new textures for 50-70% and 70-100%. In Terrain composer i use these Textures as growthmaps, having low grass on the first medium grass on the 2nd and high grass on the 3rd. Of course adding variations on each of these layers too and not having only the same detail grass textures is neccesary too. However these remapped grayscale grass distribution maps do wonders(and make sure there is no grass growing out of rocks and other layers but still growing on these little grass patches in the cracks coming from the heightblend), the outcome is just as good as manually placed grass and manual tweaks afterwards are of course still possible.

    Here you can see the results of this technique(no manual tweaks are done to the grass placement):
    $RTP3DemoScreen018.jpg
    (right click and open in new tab for bigger image)

    here some other shots that also show the grass placement well:
    $s1.jpg $s2.jpg $s3.jpg

    Placing the grass and vegetation this way is a very enjoyable moment, after steeing up the rules in TC just click on generate and 2 seconds later the whole terrain is covered in realistic growing vegetation.
     
  18. lazygunn

    lazygunn

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    That's looking very good! I don't know if this would involve too much messing around with other peoples code but would you be able to use the first 4 (or last 4, or middle 4) values of a pixel in the grass distribution map to chose a variation of grass type/texture? I don't think you'd miss 1/64th of range when it comes to your distribution and it would definitely be a nice way to pack in your grass variation along with it's height. I don't own terrain composer so wouldnt really know if what I suggested was sensible, it's just an idea.
     
  19. Becoming

    Becoming

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    I dont think you would even need to mess around with the code... TC is insanely versatile, you can practically wire all kinds of sources(and their values with curves) into all kinds of outputs. Also the support for RTP is outstanding, you can save and control almost all parameters of RTP and make presets out of it. It literally saved me hundreds hours of work just with this one terrain if i tried to make it all manually and get the same result probably even much more. Big recommendation to go along with RTP!
     
  20. virror

    virror

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    Looks like i need to have a look at TC..
     
  21. botumys

    botumys

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    Test with world machine output maps. (and composed with rtp)



    $pre5.jpg
     
    Last edited: Nov 24, 2013
  22. omarzonex

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    wow
    awesome very well nice
     
  23. virror

    virror

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    Really nice!
    I would love to read some tutorial stuff from you how you make your terrains, especially the RTP part but also how the scene is set up with effects, fog and so on. You are really talented with this stuff : D
     
  24. Becoming

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    Yeah looking really good! i'd like to see some other angles, how it looks when the cam is facing with the sun...
     
  25. botumys

    botumys

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    I follow these steps:

    1) I create rough terrain shape in mudbox
    2) export height map from mudbox.
    3) use this map in WM as input and add nodes to add more details.
    - In my case, I'm using this map as mask in an advanced perlin noise. use erosion and filters.
    -I add little rocks after by using another perlin noise node. (this node is used to export b/w map for little rocks mixing in RTP)
    -When you are done with the terrain shape in WM, create nodes to export b/w maps (flow, slopes, flat, deposit,...). I export a lot of maps with variations to allow me to mix them in photoshop after.
    -export terrain heightmap (raw 16, ibm/pc) and/or global normal map if you need it.
    ps: you can export RGBA maps too, but, in my opinion, it's more easy to use black and white as mask.
    4) when maps are done, import heightmap on unity terrain, set your textures in RTP (8 in my case, 4 POM and 4 PM+triplanar for vertical surfaces). Open the coverage tab in RTP and click on Compose splat. I'm using the layered mode.

    important: you have to flip vertically heightmap before importing otherwise all your other maps will be wrong.

    After, the best is to work step by step.
    ex:
    a) the grass, full cover
    b) cliff 1 with masked img
    c) cliff 2 ...
    For each step, click on "render control maps from source splats" to see what happens.



    here a screenshot of my panel:
    $cover.jpg

    For the lighting:

    I'm using linear mode. On the camera, I attached a global fog with tinted color, sun shafts (don't forget to attach the sun in the shaft caster slot), bloom, and antialiasing)
    I have a global directional light (sun)
    and a fake "sky light" directional pointing downward with a bluish color.
     
    Last edited: Nov 25, 2013
  26. botumys

    botumys

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    Thanks you !

    Here's a view with sun in front
    ps: I have to fix the sun position in my skymap to match my current light position. Glow and sun shafts fx are to strong too.

    $pr5.jpg

    And the terrain in scene view:
    $pr6.jpg


    for stats:

    with pixel error set to 15, I get 371 draw calls (189.2k tri). I'm using rt shadows, but I want to use lightmaps later.
     
    Last edited: Nov 25, 2013
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  27. virror

    virror

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    Thanx botumys, i really appreciate that you took your time to do this writeup!
    Very interesting to see your splat setup : )
     
  28. lazygunn

    lazygunn

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    I could serve to learn a few things from Botumys' splat organisation!

    Heres last nights work with a rtp for terrain and a hacky blend of suimono and scrawks whitecap ocean (wip thread), rtp is awesome, and so are suimono and scrawks work. After i've relaxed a bit tonight I think i'm going to work first on more suimono integration then it'll be time to go to town on the landscape, although at quite a slow pace as i'm waiting for updates on RTP and Jove for integration's sake




    Worth saying these are pretty much what you could consider 'procedural', theres no hand-placed anything, the terrain is world machine maps and rtp features, the ocean and sky is purely code driven, theres no hand placed assets or painted in shading, im looking forwards to those bits, mind!
     
  29. lazygunn

    lazygunn

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    And finally after fiddling with it all forever, a rtp terrain from the last few day, no painting or baking, just rtp features and a directional light

     
  30. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    Badly, this thread is no much active, so I'd like to show here what Peter and Nathaniel made in 24h - it's 900 sq km big and uses RTP.



    They hid easter egg somewhere over there (hehe it's only 30km x 30km area to search). And yes - following what they promised I'll give first one who find the treasure RTP3 for free and early RTP3.1 beta access :).

    Tom

    http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/218650-24-Hour-Terrain-Demo?p=1459918#post1459918
     
  31. botumys

    botumys

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    Hello !
    I continue to test RTP + AFS. Combined together, these 2 tools do a nice job!
    Here 2 new screenshots. (My goal is to create a sci-fi building embedded in a natural setting)

    $RTP_AFS.jpg

    $praes.jpg
     
    Last edited: Dec 23, 2013
    drmanhattan likes this.
  32. mk1978

    mk1978

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    This looks really nice!!! What are the actual shaders that you use from Advanced Foliage shader package? I am using RTP and I would like to use Lar’s shaders for foliage and trees. Anyway, when I imported the Advanced Foliage Shader into my projects it seemed that my RTP terrain textures “got a little soft” and I couldn’t get rid of the effect. Or did you just manage to import the whole Advanced Foliage shaders package into your project just fine?
     
  33. botumys

    botumys

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    Thanks !
    I just imported the package from asset store. I encountered shader compilation error, but after a re-compile all errors are gone.
     
  34. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    @botumys, RTP+ATS (Advanced Terrain Shader) ? You probably mean AFS, anyway - good job.

    @mk1978, could you give me an idea of the softening issue ? screenshots for comparison ?

    ATB, Tom
     
  35. botumys

    botumys

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    Yes you right :) I mixed RTP and AFS...
     
  36. mk1978

    mk1978

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    I also confirm that I was mixing ATS and AFS a little. I just tried to import AFS and I didn't have any problems (softness of the textures, etc.). I will try to import ATS later and duplicate that softness effect.
     
  37. botumys

    botumys

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    Big zone test : 625 Km2 (4 terrains of 12,5km/12,5km)

     
    jazz75 likes this.
  38. lazygunn

    lazygunn

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    I'm starting on a sample section of what will be something much larger and possibly putting it vs the same thing moved to cryengine to see whats more practical. I'm getting extremely annoyed with unity's water options
     
  39. Paddington_Bear

    Paddington_Bear

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    Hi Olivier,
    Looking great, I'm fascinated by your dedication in environment design and am a long time youtube subscriber.
    Would you mind sharing your computer specs?
    I'm in the market for a new workstation and every bit of info helps.
    Cheers.
     
  40. Becoming

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    epic :)

    With RTP 3.1 you'll be able to eliminate the last bit of visible tiling and the other options that come with it will boost the look too! I cant wait to see you squeezing the max details out of RTP then.
     
  41. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    Cool (as usual from botumys),

    Yep, RTP3.1 - I believe so - UVblend replace slider would help here a lot removing small tiling noticeable when we fly over terrain (you reduced gravity a lot, didn't you ?). I'll give you beta access soon.

    ATB, Tom
     
  42. botumys

    botumys

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    Hi, thanks ! My specs :
    intel i72600k 3.4GHz - 16 Go ram - Geforce 780 gtx

    I think I will try on a new fresh zone. I learned a lot by tweaking this one. My only problem now is to generate a nice color map (by using more than just colors)

    Thanks for the beta access ! I'm curious to see how it is possible to push quality.
    And yes I reduced gravity :) (and speed is set to 60 km/h (37.28 Mph)
     
    Last edited: Dec 28, 2013
  43. lazygunn

    lazygunn

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    Cheers for the video Botumys that was very useful, as i'm looking at doing some pretty vast areas of terrain as part of the ideas i had in my head and wanted to know how that might look in practice, certainly at high speed.

    I'm getting some technical advice from a rather esteemed fellow (in my eyes anyways) but he passed it on prior to talking particularly about it that I should consider NPR approaches to the terrain and rendering in general as the sheer amount of it and what is to be done with it would just be too much for an essentially one man job, with a few helpful folk around - So the aesthetic starts leaning more towards Jenova Chen rather than Cevat Yerli

    To that end I was thinking, I definitely still want to use RTP, and even POM, no less if it's clean (probably similar preprocessing terrain textures as detailed below), maybe even a shift to quadtree displacement mapping if that figures in at all (just mentally i prefer it as an alternative to tesselation over POM just because seeing millions of triangles everywhere is disconcerting to me), and seeing how these technologies can be used in a slightly loose fashion particularly along with terrain detail and colourmaps provided by world composer - My area of interest is very oddly Mt Rainier (and a very large area going north and south of it)which you guys covered in a demo over the same night I was suggested it by an american volcano fan, was very weird i thought i was going a bit mad when i realised where your demo was, but there are so many changes elevation, trees, features and such that to do it realistically without disturbing lurches into the uncanny valley might mean an awful lot of work

    What i'm getting at here though is,maybe Botumys and other folk in general might benefit from is using world composer and getting a sense of a best fit using real elevation and satellite data for very large terrains simply because it takes a ton of legwork away while remaining convincing over large distances, and theres plenty of places to choose from, and when it comes to using the satellite imagery as a colourmap, im planning to preprocess it with something like a kuwahara filter http://rsbweb.nih.gov/ij/plugins/kuwahara.html or coherence enhancing shock filters http://www.kyprianidis.com/p/eg2011/ to negate some 'noise' while keeping the definition of the texture. Ive tried to link to things with code so if it interests you, you can have a go, and that might at least help with the colourmap issue, because creating a good colourmap by hand over such huge distances seems daunting. And even if you significantly alter areas of the terrain by hand afterwards, I dont think any discrepancies with the colourmap should be that bad

    I have an example of a GPU based shock filter that might work well as a post process in itself, maybe, so maybe i'll be getting some very interesting landscapes happening, when i stop reading and start actually doing things

    Thanks for the education and if theres any further interest in treating satelite imagery for colourmaps based on chiefly ground based navigation rather than flight regarding preprocessing (with flight things the emphasis isnt so strong on keeping detail local to the player consistent with what they see in the distance) i'll probably look into it more!

    Also something i'll be trying is using an atmospheric scattering postprocess rather than entirely fog, if i can figure it out, for a nice natural blend out of detail for long distances and i guess yeah, if anyones interested in anything i'm saying (and im not just gibbering to myself) and I figure it out i'll make it available somewhere or at least direct you in the right direction. I should stop talking and do something useful but maybe that'll have to wait till the new year
     
  44. argosy_ops

    argosy_ops

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    Cheers!
    We're building a co-op tower defense game set in a colorful and hand-painted monster world. Despite the fact that RTP has its strength in realistic large terrains, it became our tool of choice for our own terrain. We're using heavily stylized graphics and you could compare the camera setup of our game to a classic RTS perspective. However, we decided against using orthographic tiles and instead wanted to go ahead and use the terrain engine for a more organic look.

    The miniature look that results from this style was a problem with Unity's native terrain tools. First of all, some of our settings contain steep cliffs that visually encompass the lanes both players and NPCs can use. Here, we used the triplanar projection to avoid having to line all cliffs with rock props, thus largely facilitating workflow. Furthermore, the miniaturized look lets us have a very crisp look at the detail maps. Ordinary alpha blending wasn't satisfactory to us and instead, we wanted to have heightblending that would allow us to create sharp, defined edges between the different splat layers. For our base vegetation for instance, we use a very diffuse painted texture and create definition through the height map, so that the blending looks like individual grass patches. Furthermore, the rocks look a lot more three-dimensional.

    In the past, we've been toying around with a couple of different shader systems, but none worked to our satisfaction. The problem usually was that we couldn't height-blend more than two layers. RTP solved this issue for us and we currently blend up to four layers, giving us the option to use lichen decals or similar without visual artifacts.

    $spgl_screen_landscape.jpg
     
  45. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    Heh, what an artistic twist I see here - and I like it :). I'm thinking which one of new RTP3.1 could make its look even better, maybe new emissive detail layers (can be now turned into emissive by slider - emission mask is considered to be gloss map - alpha channel from detail), or emissive water ?

    Tom
     
  46. argosy_ops

    argosy_ops

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    Great ideas! This could for instance lead to luminescent detail layers that could be particularly interesting for night scenarios. Think of Avatar or a mysteriously gleaming river or pond. Used together with the bloom post-effect, this could lead to some fascinating visuals. In fact, the yellow mushrooms you see in the scene are luminescent in our night scenarios. However, we haven't thought about water so far. Worth trying out :)
     
  47. alln2themusic

    alln2themusic

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    Ok, I give up, what's your secret for optimization?

    Are you running with DX11 turned on in unity? Parallax Mapping?

    Did you do occlusion culling? How many tree types are you using? So I got the Tropical Environments pack to make a jungle environment only to find that if I have lots of different types of tree's down, my frame rate plumets.

    When tree's are used through the terrain tool (vs. having them as game objects in the scene), do they get statically batched if the terrain object is set to static batch? I don't know why that would help, but just curious.

    I am using an older video card, Nvidia 580m GTX on my laptop with 16GB RAM and an i7 processor. Could that be something to do with it?

    What are you tree settings for each terrain? I really want to make a large terrain, but having a hard time with the optimization.

    Are you running the runtime version of terrain composer where everything is procedurally generated? Or are you not using Terrain Composer?

    RTP Question: Do you have to do anything special with RTP to get things to show up correctly at runtime if you're using multiple scenes? Like to do I have to do anything with the shader when the scene loads or should everything be good to go from how I left it in the scene view. I say this cause I had some difficulties with textures not showing up correctly when loading a scene. My main camera is actually being loaded in from the previous scene and I noticed that some aspects of the Relief Terrain shader (for instance the "Settings-->Main" section) looks for a main camera in the scene to be able to render certain GUI elements and didn't know if that effects how the shader shows up in runtime in the scene. Anyways I apologize for all these questions, but optimization had definitely thrown me for a loop. Thanks.

    David
     
  48. tomaszek

    tomaszek

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    You should be able to use RTP on multiple scenes, but remember to save all textures used by RTP (visit "combined texutres" tab in RTP script inspector) to disk. After loading scene you can alway call RefreshAll() on globalSettingsHolder object (refer to docs) to be sure shader is properly feed with all params (although they should be setup on Start())

    Tom
     
  49. ValrikRobot

    ValrikRobot

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    I just wanted to share my first screenshot of the very beginning of my world. Its a work in progress but I think the general look is coming along great.

    View attachment 85623
     
  50. ValrikRobot

    ValrikRobot

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