HORIZON[ON] - Bridge the gap between the sky and your scenery.

It is but as twobob said, if you work with gles2 you are limited, but that is just gles2... gles3 gives you much more options.

Yes, imagine Horizon[ON] as a very big blanket with a hole in the middle... you can put whatever you want under it. The hole and the outside have a transparency fade at the edges so it blends nicely with the terrain(may it be mesh or unity terrain)and the sky(skybox/skydome...).

 

I have another question apart from the 'one direction needs to be ocean' issue.
Also following the workflow as layed out in the examples for the 'Multi level arrangement' setup: creating a colour map, height map and a multi channel layer mask for the different terrain textures and water.

The problem is that, while the mountain range at the coast appears as I'd expect, there also appear quite a few apparently random solo-mountains that have a strange 'spikey' appearance. They do not relate to anything I (consciously) put in the height map, but seem to spring up mostly where to textures meet (or overlap) in the mask image.

Here's some screen shots showing the problem, and the setup of the heightmap and the mask image:








(the squares in the middle of the photoshop images indicate the approximate location of the original terrain)

I tried a couple of things: my first idea was that maybe the mask map was misaligned with the height map. This was indeed the case, but correcting it didn't make those uncalled-for mountains disappear.

Then I tried if it was because I had at first put the full-strength height map in the blue channel only (which is mapped to the layer that I've assigned a stony texture to) and had used a toned-down versions in the other channels; I suspected that the height maps might be normalised per channel, so that it could happen that at the border of a transparent area in (say) the green channel in the mask image, that green channel might receive a mix of the height map information for the green & blue channels. Because the height map value for blue would be way higher, it could cause it to be interpreted too high in the normalised 'green' ontext. Not sure if that makes sense, I'm sorry if it is very far-fetched
Anyhow, the problem seems to be the same if I use the same heightmap value for all channels anyhow. So exit that theory as well.

Currently, I've ran out of hypotheses... if anyone has a hint it would be most welcome!
Thanks in advance
Luthien

 

Hi Luthien,

The heightmaps are not normalized per channel, they are lerped just like the colormaps, the only explanation for the spikes is that there are some (relatively)bright pixels on the heightmap. If your terrain is rather large you migth need to put more of the displacement planes around your terrain, or what would make more sense in your case, is to work with blendmeshes as your mountains are very localised. You dont need to displace flat areas. Even though Horizon is very fast, you can save a bit of performance by not putting displacement everywhere. The reason that the solo mountains appear so spikey is that the mesh resolution can not keep up with the heightmap, with localised displacement (blendmeshes) you can focus the detail to the places where you need it. First i would have said that you have small holes in your masks but since you use the same displacement on all channels that cann not be the case so it must be a combination of bright pixels on the hightmap and too low mesh resolution. I'd suggest that you try to blur your heightmap a bit and see if it helps. For further help i need to know your heightmap resolution and the size of your terrain.

Please report back & good luck,
Peter

 

ok but how do i use it on mobile if i can t have linear space option? i m using unity 5 target android and ios.

 

Sorry i missed your message before.
Linear vs. Gamma is not a problem, Gamma will never give correct lighting falloff but we are already very used to it and this is the case with any shader. Anyway, i guess your problem is just that horizon is too bright and to compensate that you can use the global tint to make it darker

 

this wont actually let you walk to those areas though correct?

im just wondering if this asset has a feature to stitch multiple terrains together. or something along those lines. iv tried other assets with out much success to try to create a very large world.

 

ooooooooooh such a simple trick! thanks for the quick response!

 

Such an amazing asset, just saw this today because it is on sale. Our terrain is voxel based and procedurally generated using Terrain Engine (found here http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/te...inite-procedural-smooth-terrain.174595/page-9). This would be so perfect for our project as the terrain draw distance is kind of limited since its voxel based.

So of course, my question is, what are your thoughts about this working on a procedurally generated infinite terrain that is voxel based (more terrain chunks are generated in front of the user as they walk through the world, and chunks are removed behind the user in a radius type deal). Awesome asset, looks so great!

 

Is this where we post the competition screenshots?

 

As long as you are not concerned too much about the distant terrain not being a 100% accurate representation of your user altered world, you can use it as is as infinite terrain because of its tiling nature, worldspace mapping and offset abilities... with a few lines of code(very few, like 3 lines) to shift the player and horizon back to the scene origin you could have the illusion of infinite terrain... i tried it and its super simple to make the camera move forward infinitely. Of course at some point it will just repeat but depending on the tile size and texture resolutions this could be several 100km away.

 

yeah sure thanks for participating!

 

Here is my score! That balloon poping game is actually quite fun.

 

When does the contest end?

 

*** Just wanted to resubmit my score. It's higher now.

 

How would this asset work alongside a day/night scripting system? I reviewed the manual and don't find any mention of the word "time" or "night" in there. Does it only work for daytime scenes, and/or scenes with non-dynamic time?

 

It has been demonstrated working with Time of Day.

 

Hi I'm just reposting what someone else has asked-
This wont actually let you walk to those areas though correct?
OR - fly over them in a plane?
thanks.

 

Hi Peter,
thanks, I'll try that.

The terrain itself is a Terraincomposer 4x4 grid of tiles measuring 2048x2048 each. Interestingly, it says in Terraincomposer that the X-scale = 1.998049, and y = 1.95122; though I don't remember setting that.
In the Unity inspector the scale for each tile is just 1, for the same 2048 size tiles.
The heightmap I used for the terrain is 16 bit greyscale 8192x8192.

Heightmap and mask image used in Horizon[ON]:
heightmap: source file is 8192 x 8192 .psd file, 4 channels, 8 bit / channel.
Import settings (inspector) max size = 2048; format = compressed (I also tried this with the max size set to 4096, without much difference though).
layermask: ditto.

The settings for Horizon[ON] are:
Transform: scale X - Y - Z : 8.2 - 1 - 8.2 (I just changed that to 1 for all three; but that doesn't change anything ..?)
Transition settings: scale inner / outer / height: 0.67 / 1 / 0.4
Main settings: scale (m) 40000 / 40000
All layers have a tiling of 1 / 1
The height map "height" setting is set to 1198 meter for the mountains at the shore to get the proper height.

Thanks a lot for your help!


EDIT just tried blurring the height (displacement) map, but no avail. There really aren't any hot pixels in there: I checked also with a curve adjustment mask added to the layer in Photoshop set to hugely magnified the darkest range of the image. At the texture / layer / mask borders, where those artifact hill spring up, there really aren't any contrasting pixels.
I also noticed that the lower height mountains (not the ones on the coast) don't cause any displacement in the terrain at all.

You'll just see that I overlooked something really really REALLY obvious ...

 

works perfectly fine

note that this was from development stage and does not show the full quality that you can achieve.

 

You can bake the displacement into the meshes, meaning that you can have collision and just walk on it. For closeup terrain i recommend to use rtp though(RTP is just unbeatable visually in close up). Horizon[ON] can be used as a terrain shader(mesh based) as the included demo scene shows but its not intended for it. For flying over it is just perfect as you can move for hundreds of miles(or infinitely if you can live with the fact that the terrain will repeat at some point). To make use of this you'll need to make a small dynamic collision mesh though(this functionality is not included). Anyway, with the 15 bucks its currently at you cant go wrong these sales are very hard to get so the price wont be this cheap again anytime soon . I am very confident that Horizon[ON] is valuable for any unity dev who not only do strictly 2d. It can even be used as background in 2.5D sidescroller or in a topdown game. its just so flexible that i am sure that anybody who does 3d in unity can use it. Depending on the textures you can use it for Mars or Moon or any otherworldy scenario as well.

 

You can try to put some blendmesh planes to those places where you have the spikes and make the blend meshes rather small to see if has to do with the mesh resolution. Another thing you can try is to set your heightmap to truecolor instead of compressed(might be compression artifacts) and also try bypass srgb in the advanced import settings for it. Anyway my best guess is just that the heightmap detail is too small for the mesh resolution, this can be solved by scaling the displacement planes by half and placing the double amount. if you are satisfied with the overall resolution and you just want to get rid of the spikes without altering the heightmap you can also use vertex painting to reduce displacement locally(feature has to be turned on in the horizon master, see the tooltips) you can just paint away the spikes

 

i'm not sure if the contest is still going on or not.
The demo is addictive and the music suits it perfectly.

 

Bought it! Super product, BTW.

 

Thanks, yeah its still going and your score is great

Thanks, dont hesitate to leave a review or a rating

 

Last minute each month, GMT.

 

Just bought it! I was always wondering if there were a better way to get unlimited visibility without using multiple giant terrains...

 

Thanks, i was wondering as well for a long time, a lot of thought has gone into this

 

Hey Guys,

I came across this plugin today and was pretty impressed. My own current project could make use of this kind of blending very well. However, I'm using custom paged geometry for the terrain in my levels. I saw a previous answer that this tool will work on any rectangular or square set of geometry, but I'm curious to know if it can handle several meshes that are children of a parent, as I don't really have the option of merging them.

My maps look a little like this (just a default map I generated a moment ago):


I realize it's something of a stretch to hope that your tool can handle this case, but if it can, then it can definitely allow me to shrink my maps and improve map loading times by a bunch.

Thanks in advance and cool stuff!

 

Bought it also! A unique asset along with the SnazzyTools and SnazzyPaint!

 

Hard to tell, i can't really make much out of the screenshot, can you tell me more about sizes, player perspective and so on... i think with the flexibility horizon has to offer you can benefit and find a way, might be just a matter of creativity and customization although again i'd need more info to suggest something. The least it can do is to extend you world beyond its playable area.

Thx too

 

Fair enough, but that sounds as though you're confident that it would actually be able to extend the visible area, despite the map consisting of a hierarchy of geometry?

The player's camera is a top-down view (approximately 70 degrees downward) about 50-75 units above the map and can't be rotated during play. During cutscenes the camera might end up viewing the map from ground level or slightly above, possibly looking off into the horizon, which is the case that might use this tool best. The map above is approximately 500m by 500m, so it's not extremely large.

Thanks for you help.

 

omg I don't think I'll make it, when is the competition over?

 

Good, I'll look into that.

Meanwhile, I found an import setting that gets rid of most of the spikes: Advanced -> Import Type -> Normal map (was: Default). See the difference below:

The overall resolution could indeed be better. The difference with the main terrain is quite obvious, though maybe not all that obvious if fog etcetera will be added.
Anyhow, there's so many variables and being a complete Unity newbie (this is my first unity project) there's lots to learn and to improve.
Actually, the original height map is an artefact from a 2009 attempt to model a similar landscape in Opensimulator. I've never been much of a gamer, I only had a vague idea of Unity and Unreal as "those engines that people build shooting games with". When I first saw what these engines could do, I was absolutely blown away.

Anyhow, it's great fun to finally being able to get this project going, but I need to learn a lot.

 

Thanks for the reply. Video looks great! Are there any ToD integration instructions, or will it become obvious as I work through the setup of my scene with Horizon[ON]?

 

Ugh, addictive-ness.

 

GOD!!! that score tell me the secret i want it!!!
But i think to buy with triplanar shader

 

Thanks for the sale! The money I saved bought me a copy of SnazzyGrid2. This is a great day.

 

Thanks, it's very much drag and drop. Any slider/floatfield/checkbox that has something like ambient in the name is of interest... The manual and the tooltips should get you going in no time. Especially if you integrate TOD in the included horizon example scene, before making your own first steps with horizon, you'll have your day/night cycle running super quick. If you have problems figuring it out just leave a note here and i will explain further. uSky is also made compatible with horizon by the way and the maker of Unistorm is working on it too afaik.

 

Hi

I just picked this up from the asset store and imported into an existing project that is set to mobile / iPhone, which does not support Linear colour space, so the demo scene looks all washed out.

What can I do to fix this?

br

Nalin

 

Hi Nalin,
In the main settings tab lower the global tint brightness to 0.5
Cheers,
Peter

 

hey @Becoming i have tried downloading the asset multiple times but it always gives me an error......

 

Hey Hamad,
what unity version are you using? This is clearly an issue from unity and not from Horizon[ON], there are already hundreds of users who never reported anything like this, also the errormessage points to a problem with unity.

I am sure we can figure it out

Cheers,
Peter

 

thanks for your reply, iam using unity 4.6.1f and unity 5.02 both are installed ive tried on both but still not working... what could be the issue??

 

I'm looking, but can't see what you mean as I was expecting a slider?

BTW is this meant to be the standard setup for mobile or is there a special way of doing it (most likely will be using Skyshop)

N

 

For mobile, there are too mayn possible configurations to generalize, but a rule of thumb is GLES2 supports very few textures, GLES3 is better but still not compareable to desktop. Some features have to be disabled in both GLES2 and GLES3... Afaik there is not a certain feature that can not be used, it's more about the combination of features, You have to test and decide what you need and what you can leave away For Desktop/Consoles you can put everything to the max.

Edit: another thing you have to consider for mobile is that you cant use the displacement shaders on 99% of devices, only nVidia shield and some other rather game oriented mobiles support it. you have to make use of the bake displacement features and after baking change the displacement materials to ones using the object shader.

 

To be honest i have never encountered this issue nor do i know of anyone else who did. The things i would try fist are deleting the pack from the Unity assets folder(Somewhere in C:\Users\YOURUSER\AppData\Roaming\Unity). Then just to be safe do a reboot and try to download it again. It definitely works, i know for sure, it must be a broken download.

Please report back

Cheers,
Peter

 

There are a lot of topics about that error in the Unity forum. Could be a problem with non-western characters in the target path.

https://www.google.com/search?q="couldn't decompress" site:forum.unity3d.com

(Personally I don't have any problems importing Horizon[On])