Terrain Composer2 a next generation GPU powered terrain tool.

Hello Everyone,

As promised the PDF document on how Peter and me made the 24 hour demo:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/if9dpxqeseenj11/24 Hour demo - How we made it.pdf

Nathaniel

 

Thanks a lot for this, this will be very helpful.

By the way your new Asset looks great, I plan to buy it, just to support more of your projects to keep you going. So far I love all of your assets they are my favorite. Keep up the great work..

PS Going to show people your new asset at school tomorrow, in college for Game Production , just bout done, I can see some liking it for level design. I also plan to buy another copy of it for my company as well. Keep these great assets coming. Your very talented my friend.

 

Hi Nat and Peter,..

I just read the PDF doc on 24-h. Great work,..

Most of it was as expected. One thing surprised me a bit although I have already seen that it is the default way TC and RTP functions together:

The splat textures are greyscale only. Which means that all color must be from the colormap ie. basicly the original satelite image. It works like a charm I see with dirt, grass, rock etc...

But what about tree shadows on the colormap??? And what if the image contains buildings etc... Is it just a question of finding the right area to use? And make corrections inside photoshop??

Thx for all your fantastic products...

 

I think this will answer a lot of questions - and it´s a comprehensive workflow documentation, very nice, thanks for sharing!

 

Hello,

Yes the colors come only from the colormap. This is basically just a way of doing it, but you can do it other ways too. In RTP3.1 there's a new feature with colormap and color splat texture blending based on the splat height texture. Where you for example can have the lower part of the splat texture desaturated by RTP and this will only give colormap colors then, while the higher part would be the colors of the splat texture. For example if you have a dirt texture with little stones sticking out. The dirt part will then be the color of the colormap and the stone will have the color from the spat texture.

There are no tree shadows in the colormap, because we removed all shadows from the satellite image with WorldComposer's shadow removal algorithm. If you mean trees casting shadows on the terrain, you can use a shadow map for that in RTP, also realtime shadows are handled correctly by RTP. If the image contains buildings you would normally want to put the 3d buildings there or leave it. Of course you can photoshop it in any way you want.

Nathaniel

 

I wanted to know.
How do we create an "example" to be included into the Terrain Composer so that next time we can create a procedural terrain based on the "example" packages that we've made before.

 

Hello,

In TerrainComposer windows in the menu there's File -> Save and Load. It's that easy... . These are stored as prefabs and you can export them into a Unity package in the Project window. Then you can import them again in other projects.

Nathaniel

 

Hi Nat,..

Once again I am almost breathlessly amazed at how smoothly RTP and TC are coming together. I am not sure you realise it but you, Peter and Tom will be the grandfathers of a countless number of virtual wolrds. Thank you.

Sorry. I meant the ACTUAL TREES. Satellite imagery of forests always look a bit amiss when viewed on a flat surface, IMHO. But I suppose it can be made to resemble forest floor. Or putting grass on top of it. What did you do? There must have been some areas in the map with small forests... Did you erase them to grass in photoshop? I don't remember seeing "flat trees" in the demo.... but then again I didn't run around for hours like some others did ;-D

One question: How about substances and TC/RTP?? I bought Substance Painter/Designer but didn't really mess much with it yet. At least not for terrain.

And another: I am struggling with resolution. You seem to have downscaled your terrain quite a lot. Does that mean that one unit is NOT 1 meter? For instance if I wanted to put in an airplane made in UnityFS in a downscaled "world" it would matter quite a lot with the units wouldn't it??

Happy coding, Jesper

 

Thanks for the compliments .

Yes if the shadows are removed it already looks more like a forest floor instead. Well actually if you look in the 24 hour demo pdf, you see on the first and second image that it is actually all forest mostly. Peter only adjusted the green color tints in photoshop and yes it makes it look more like grass and a forest floor. We didn't cut or remake any forest or something else.

Substances are possible with RTP. We downscaled the satellite image because it was a 36k. What it means is we changed the resolution from 36000 to 8192, but didn't change anything on the terrain scale itself. So 1 Unity Unit is 1 meter in the demo. It has no use to use different terrain scaling then 1 meter, as you would run into issues with physics. As that would also need that scale.

Nathaniel

 

I did some quick tests with substance and RTP+TC, I used the space ship hull substance (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/1323), here is how it looks on very simple TC RTP terrain:

 

Looks awesome . Looking forward to see your progress .

Nathaniel

 

I am trying to load a heightmap in to a new terrain generated with TerrainComposer and it is not working.

It is a 512x512 heightmap and I have the heightmap resolution for the terrain set to 513. When I load it into a heightmap filter, it does nothing.

I opened the Island.raw heightmap as an example in Photoshop, because that one does work.... I notice it looks nothing like the heightmap I am trying to use, so maybe this is why it is not working.

It works just fine when I load this heightmap into a normal terrain object from unity, no problems at all, but when I try to load it into a Terrain made using TerrainComposer, it does not work.

Can anyone tell me why my heightmap is not working? It is a basic heightmap I got off the internet, is it in the wrong format for TerrainComposer, and if so, how do I convert that into a heightmap that TerrainComposer will be able to use.

Thanks, I have been stuck on this for 5 days now, and no one seems to be able to tell me why it is not working.

 

here is my heightmap checklist for TC:

Saving raw files in Photoshop:
16bit
greyscale images!
order: PC/IBM

Opening raw files in Photoshop:
channels: 1
16bit
order: PC/IBM

maybe this can help you

 

Hello,

You can always send me a mail and ask, I try to reply within the same day. It is as Thousand describes. Let me know if you can get it to work...

Nathaniel

 

Hi, I am trying to use the runtime example off the site and tryed using the runtime script in the main asset folder but I cant get ether of them to work at all I want to get some random generation at runtime but I cant get the examples working at all. The example package throws a Argument is out of range error when its running.

I did also try following the documentaion for getting started but this also throws an error when trying to get the main script.

I dont know if theres somthing im missing but you might know what im doing wrong.

 

Hello,

Are you familiar with TerrainComposer? Do you have a TerrainComposer project in your Scene? This will automatically be instantiated when you open the TerrainComposer window.

Nathaniel

 

Hi Nathaniel,

I'm having some rather interesting grass problems when moving from billboard to mesh. My wonderful full field of grass turned into a spotty mess. It took me some time to figure out that the grass was being rotated upside down! After switching between billboard and mesh, I found what might be the culprit:

1. I first assigned a billboard as a grass
   
2. Then made sure the min/max width and height were all positive for that grass (1, 1, 1, 1)
   
3. Then I switched to a mesh grass
4. I checked the mesh random width/height and they were each 1

Perfect right? I checked the render and this is what I saw:


Upside-down grass!

After tearing my hair out, I think I found the problem. Once I switched the mesh back to billboard grass, the min/max width and height were not 1, 1, 1, 1 like I originally set them. Instead, they were -1, 1, -1, 1! That meant that they faded from being 1x1 to being -1x-1 which is upside-down!

So something must be switching the values... do you know what's going on? More importantly, any solution?

Thanks!!
-Mark

 

Hello Mark,

This is an Unity terrain bug that is in there since the beginning. You can contact support@Unity3d.com and tell them about it, hope that it will help that they fix it.

Nathaniel

 

Hi Nathaniel,
You have already used the occlusion culling on multiple terrains?

 

Wow, that's a major bug then... How would one use mesh grass at all if this is happening?

 

It seems that noise setting and size have influence on it, so by tweaking this it might get better, although this is still a bug then.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/problem-with-detail-mesh.114936/

Nathaniel

 

Perfect! I set the noise level to 1 and I seem to be having 99% success rate on the mesh details. Thanks a lot!

 

Hi Nathaniel,

Great and powerful tool!

Could you please make tutorial or post on forum how to "bake" hand painted splats and hand sculpted terrain (via Unity Terrain Tools) to TC. I tried <get> but it did not work. TC always discard above changes when I hit "generate"

Thank you in advance
CD

 

Hello,

I just added this to the http://www.terraincomposer.com/troubleshooting

When I make manual changes with the Unity terrain tools, it will be lost again when generating with TerrainComposer.
* You can export heightmaps/splatmaps/trees and grass from the current state of the terrain. This can be done by choosing an output button and enabling the 'Export' button in the top of the TerrainComposer window. Then you can import this again in the first layer, so you can use other layers to generate on top of it.

So you need to enable splat output, then activate the export button and there you can export your splatmaps. Then you add a layer, put it at the top with the '<' button. And set filter input to image and in settings enable 'Splatmap'.

If you need more help, let me know .

Nathaniel

 

Thank you Nathaniel,

It worked perfectly for splatmaps and heightmaps.

BTW: Below step is very important, so you should concern to add this to the troubleshooting section:

"So you need to enable splat output, then activate the export button and there you can export your splatmaps. Then you add a layer, put it at the top with the '<' button. And set filter input to image and in settings enable 'Splatmap'."

Regards
CD

 

Hello CD,

Thanks for telling, I added it, also how to do heightmaps .

Nathaniel

 

I am finally able to assign splat textures and a splatmap, and then generate the terrain using different textures depending on the height. Works great!

But now I want to paint some custom textures onto the terrain, like castle floor and a road path through the map. Problem is, after I do my custom painting, if I make a change in the terrain and want to re-generate the splatmap textures, all my custom painting is now gone!

Any solution for this?

Was this just addressed in the post before me?

 

Scroll up a little bit to see the solution.

 

Hi Nat,...

I am really sorry but can you explain this to me once more.... I absolutely suck and can't comprehend the relationship between pixels/resolution, units and meter.... Sry for being stupid :-D

- So the actual real world area is 30 km x 30 km, correct? Or exactly 30.107 x 30.107.
- The satelite map image (colormap) was originally 36.000 pixels x 36.000 pixels - scaled down to 8192 x 8192 pixels.
- Coming back to TC in the end you make only 4 terrains = 2 x 2 terrains.
- You slice the downscaled colormap in 4 = 4096 pixels x 4096 pixels times 4, correct?
- SO... Each terrain must be sized 15.000 units x 15.000 units (or exactly 15.053,5 units), still correct??
- .. and to each terrain is assigned a colormap of 4096 pixels giving a de facto 8192 pixel resolution of the whole terrain?
- .... and the heightmap was 4096 pixels from the beginning when exported from WC, and never changed, correct?

SO in the end = 30k meter = 30k units = 8k colormapresolution = 4k heightresolution (=4k splatresolution), correct??

... And how does basemap resolution relate to these other resolutions...?

It is quite different from the way World Composer create terrains, where an area of this size would be created with considerably more terrains than 2x2. Or do I misunderstand something??

Jesper

 

Got a noob question, so I use terrain composer with the examples to create a terrain for one scene. its awesome and all. the I go to make a second scene with a different terrain, and if I generate a new terrain, it messes up the one in my first scene. I tried taking the first terrain and making it a prefab, renaming the terrain, the folder.. and no luck... please help
Again,\ I am using the example engine to generate them

 

This is a good question - I also wonder what the best workflow would be, to adress this issue? Maybe the "Terrain Composer Splat-Mapping" has to be finished before using custom splatmaps?

 

Hello,

Yes it is addressed in the post before. I added this to the troubleshoot section of my site:
http://www.terraincomposer.com/troubleshooting/

Nathaniel

 

Hello Jesper,

Yes all your statements are correct . We don't use basemap so resolution can be set to the lowest, that is something RTP handles on its own. You can still create the same terrain size with 2x2 in WorldComposer, only you would need to use lower image zoom level. So you can export a 4x4k satellite images directly. But downscaling gives a little better quality, we went for the max in the demo...

Nathaniel

 

This is because TerrainComposer creates the terrainData's in the TerrainComposer Example/Terrains, and with every new example they will get overwritten. So if you want to use the created example you can drag and drop those terrainData's in another folder. Unity Terrains are saved as TerrainData's in Unity...

Nathaniel

 

That would be the best approach yes, but sometimes you can forget something. But then you can export the whole splatmap, and import it again in the first layer and do something with TerrainComposer on top of that...

Nathaniel

 

I see, that makes sense.

 

Getting a pink terrain when create terrains with Terrain composer. Creating normal terrains with unity works fine. Using 1.470 & example most recent one.

Getting error in console

Shader error in 'Hidden/TerrainEngine/Splatmap/Lightmap-AddPass': 'vert': output parameter 'o' not completely initialized at line 44

 

That is very strange, since TerrainComposer creates Unity terrains. I think you got a terrain shader conflict, might be another terrain shader in your project. Are you in DirectX 11 mode?

Nathaniel

 

So I purchased this, world composer, and RTP today, big investment! So far it looks like a very useful tool, very comprehensive, but the RTP support seems really lacking... Or maybe I'm just not looking at this right. I thought I could generate using RTP assets the same way I could from the Example package... But it doesn't look set up that way.

It looks like to get RTP to generate I have to set stuff up... Not the end of the world, but definitely going not making my production goals tonight if that's the case.

Is it possible to get an RTP package set up similar to the example package? Could be extremely helpful, nothing worse than dumping many shiny pennies just to hit a brick wall until you've read gobs of documentation.. which is not why I dumped all those shiny pennies!!

 

Hello,

You mean you bought TerrainComposer? As that has the example package inside. RTP is not a terrain generator but a terrain renderer. All you need to do is setup RTP which only takes a few minutes. Tom the developer just made a new tutorial video with the first steps:

Nathaniel

 

Thanks for the fast response Nathaniel!

Yeah I purchased Terrain Composer as well (this is the TC thread right? lol)

Yeah I watched the beginning of that video yesterday, I made the mistake of watching only the first minute or so when he said "generated in World Maker" I skimmed through it and didn't see Terrain Composer so I shut it off.... Now that I watch it again I realize he wasn't working from the World Maker tool but the basic Unity terrain, my bad!

I'm still confused how RTP works inside of Terrain Composer. I got RTP basically working with generated terrains, - but what about TC? Does it require that I put in a preset? When I generate terrain with RTP I don't think it does anything, neither does it add the RTP script to the terrain.

Might be useful to have a RTP preset set up... Terrain Composer really made everything easy it seemed up until when I wanted to use RTP... Suddenly I can't find any documentation on why/what the RTP button is supposed to do.

 

Well RTP doesn't work inside TerrainComposer. I only programmed that TC gives RTP some commands to set it up quicker. TerrainComposer uses standard Unity terrain and RTP works on standard Unity terrain. So you can use them indepandant and with each other. What you only need to do in TC is in TC Terrain List -> Splat textures -> Shift click <RTP> (after assigning your splat textures). To get exact workflow it is on page 15 in the TerrainCompsoer manual.

If you need more help let me know .

Nathaniel

 

Now Unity 5 has a 64-bit editor, how long until we can start playing about with enormous terrains inside Unity?

Seriously though - do you have a timeline for U5 support? I'm on the closed beta, and thought I'd try importing TC - as expected, there's a few errors

 

TerrainComposer works fine in Unity 5, if you use the automatic code converter, if you double click the convert text in the Unity console...

Nathaniel

 

Ha! I totally didn't spot that Good work!

 

Hi. I've been attempting to use terrain composer in conjunction with RTP, but unfortunately it seems that terrain composer is overriding the RTP basemap distance and leaving me with a grey untextured terrain beyond a certain range.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/48126166/terrain_issue.png

What can I do about this?

 

Check your materials and blends on where it happens based on height of your terrain. So say sand from x to you then grass from you to zero etc.

 

The problem doesn't appear to be with materials or blends, I can have no splatmaps setup at all (which just covers the whole terrain in the first texture in the texture list. But still the basemap cuts off in the distance...

 

Some screens of my project

I use RTP3 with Terrain Composer.
4 terrains of 2500 x 2500 (100 km²)
I use a custom culling script - multiple freezes in 32b (editor), work fine in 64b