Terrain Composer2 a next generation GPU powered terrain tool.

Hello,

Deleting TerrainComposer doesn't help, because its not doing anything then using the standard Unity terrains. It could have to do with importing additional vegetation shaders from the Asset Store, did you import something new before it happened?

Nathaniel

 

Hello,

Hmmm strange, if there's no grass layer it should give the message 'Current settings will not generate an output'. You have to add a grass layer, before something will generate. Maybe we can do a skype screenshare to see what is going on. My account is Nathaniel.Doldersum

Nathaniel

 

Hello. Great work on TC. I have a few rookie issues.

When I click on the 'Color' icon (Colormap Output) it automatically also selects 'Export' (Export Output to Image) and at the bottom gives me the option to 'Export .Png'. If I then deselect 'Export' it also deselects 'Color', but the 'Generate' option at the bottom continues to not show up and instead just displays 'Choose an Output Button --> Height,Color,Splat,Tree,Grass or Object'.

How do I then generate a colormap? If I click on Height, Splat, Tree, Grass, or Object, it does not auto select 'Export' and it gives me the option to generate. I can turn on auto generate but it still does not seem to generate a colormap.

In your TerrainComposer Introduction/Demo video, you demo a different version than the most recent version that I am using but you have the option at the bottom of Colormap to 'Generate'.

This happens with a new project and on another machine with a different version of Unity. It must be something I am doing wrong or out of order. So, basically, I do not have the option to generate a colormap.

Thank you for your time and effort.


Edit: Also, how do you assign trees and grass? Here is what I show for trees: http://i.imgur.com/YfYgRhS.jpg
And here is grass: http://i.imgur.com/Gt3HLTH.jpg

I see no way to add them. I cannot click on 'Not Assigned' for trees, and grass shows no way at all of adding the prefabs.

However, adding an 'Object' works, as they have the circular 'Select Game Object' popup.

 

Hello,

You have to choose an output button, if you select nothing you get that message 'Choose an Output Button...'. You can create a colormap exactly like the way you do. Select 'Color' output, then the 'Export' button gets automatically selected as well. Because colormaps are images, so it's not directly generated on a terrain and the colormap options isn't there in the standard Unity terrain shader. You will need RTP or Ats colormap shader to be able to use a colormap.
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/5664
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/search/ats colormap

Then how to make the colormap itself I explain in this video, I changed this to directly export to an image though:

Nathaniel

 

Hi Nathaniel,

Some how I am getting blurry Billboards again. I do not have any AFS or anything else install or running that I am aware of that is doing anything with billboards.

I do have RTP running in the scene with the pixelated billboards. Its only happening to terrain composer generated trees. When I create a new scene with no terrain composer the tree billboards look fine.

Any idea? Does RTP do something will tree billboards?

 

Hi Nathaniel, just wondering how progress on V2 is coming along. So looking forward to its node based system.
Also any word on the Terrain streaming asset your developing?
If you need anyone to beta test

 

I removed RTP and I'm still getting blurry trees billboards with Terrain Composer.

If i create a new scene and add a terrain I can paint trees and get normal billboards.
If i use Terrain composer to generate trees all the billboards no matter what trees i use are all blurry and pixelated. It only happens in terrain composer and I have no idea why. As far as i know I do not have any shaders or scripts that are changing the billboards.

 

Hello John,

Unity is working on a new terrain system and also streaming, so I'd like to wait that out. I will make an update to TerrainComposer with some cool features of TC2, with more noises and with min-max sliders.

Nathaniel

 

I really wonder how that can be. Best we do a skype screenshare, my account is Nathaniel.Doldersum

Nathaniel

 

Hello, i come from the wrong thread, the World Composer one, as this is a Terrain Composer issue

The Only Selected solution doesn't work, my layer 0 is still blank, i must have messed up something. I think i'll start over.

 

I am trying to understand how to make auto tiles. I mean, i have 4 images to use as splatmap, with a name convention, which is name_x0_y0, i also have 4 terrain tiled in my Terrain Composer window. How can i make them understand to load the correct splat image?

I notice that when i generate them using WC it works fine, but doing it manually wont work, it just tile the same splat image all over the terrains.

Thank you.

 

I'm not sure why its doing it as well. I'll look you up on skype today if i can or in the next day or two. Thanks for the help!

If i create a new standard unity terrain & add trees to it they get normal billboards.
If i create a new TC terrain & add trees to it they get the pixelated billboards.

 

Would you be interested into coding this for the Unreal Engine?

I know people on the forums over there said they would be interested in more useful assets, you know, the things that aren't models and textures

 

It is to do with additional vegetation shaders, and I'm sure its something I'm doing wrong or something wrong with my setup, the grass thing happened as soon as I changed a shader on a plant (even when the plant isn't in the scene) I've got AFSv3 and I was changing the shader on a tree.
So I'm hoping that it is some knowledge I am lacking. But I am so impressed with the level of support and the amount of effort you've put into world composer, that I've just spent hours creating a series of YouTube videos about terrain making in unity.

The videos are from an inexperienced "don't know what I'm doing point of view" using World Machine, Terrain Composer, AFS, RTP and Unistorm in the same project. It is my hope and intention that the videos help promote these great assets, help others and help you to help me. Also I wanted to try and give something back to the community by way of a thankyou for helping me with my solution to the edge of the world problem.

Cant have more that 5 peices of media so here is a link to the last one:

http://youtu.be/FNwj9vbqCCw

Sorry it ended up being so long.

Roy

 

Hello Nathaniel,

I wonder if TC is able to use a mesh (box primitive or more complex volume) as terrain conformer. For instance, use a mask in a heightmap filter that have a mesh as input to sculpt locally the terrain based on the precision of the mesh volume...a kind of 3d brush.

Regards,

hlx

 

@nomax5 Thanks for taking the time to make a great set of videos for us. Much appreciated.

 

You can see in this video how to do it:

Nathaniel

 

Hello,

Thanks for asking, but at the moment I don't have time for this as I'm working on many projects.

Nathaniel

 

Hello Roy,

Thanks for making those video's to explain the horizon issue. Something I've also struggled with in the past, not only ending terrain, but the horizon also needs to be blurry and not be a harsh line. You have a good solution here, and such big terrain can be made with TerrainComposer as well. But we already worked on this issue and Peter also has a great solution for this which also solves the blurring:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/horizon-on-make-your-horizons-look-real.259733/

Tom and Peter will work on this the next days, and hopefully it will be released this week, otherwise next week.

Nathaniel

 

Hello,

You can use raycasting as rules, which makes this possible. You can also make raw heightmap stamps for this...

Nathaniel

 

hey just curious if this works with the unity 5.0 beta? I love TC, but with the 32 bit editor i've not been able to really create the size of terrain that i'd like to for a truely massive world. i'd also be sweet if we could increase the amount of tiles/size of them in the example projects tab. as of right now, if u want 10x10 terrain tiles, they need to have 512 resolution ='(

Edit: also it seems that overall TC generation has slowed down A LOT for my system. I used to be able to generate a 10x10 terrain with some very basic heightmap within a minute. now that same process takes at LEAST 5 minutes. Is this news?

 

Hello,

Yes TerrainComposer and WorldComposer work with Unity5. The speed that TC generates has all to do with the resolution and the amount of layers/filters/mask you use. There's not anything changed in TC performance that than I made it faster in newer updates.

Nathaniel

 

Help! me make my island using terrain composer

I've made an island in World machine


http://www.mogstat.com/temp_images/terrain_view.jpg

My outputs are

Heightmap raw16

http://www.mogstat.com/temp_images/terrain_heightmap.jpg

Splat map 8bit bmp or 16bit tiff

http://www.mogstat.com/temp_images/terrain_splat.jpg

sand / not sand mask
rock / not rock mask
Ambient Occlusion map
color map

http://www.mogstat.com/temp_images/terrain4.jpg

I imported this map using the old unity terrain system got lava and every thing ran around its all working.

But I want to use terrain composer and RTP but I keep getting stuck.

I can make the terrains 2x2 import the height map spread across all 4 terrains fine.

The problem comes where I try to use splat maps and RTP

So new project load in Terrain composer, RTP AFS Unistorm no errors.

Window terrain composer dock it next to the inspector
What do I do next?
Start up RTP and configure it like in the " RTP 3.1 - First Steps" video?
or do I sort of evoke RTP from within Terrain composer?


PS I've only got the "Standard" version of world machine so I can't export tiles

Roy

 

Hello Roy,

Yes you need to setup RTP Lod Manager like Tom shows in his tutorial video. In TC you can assign splat textures to RTP, but can do in RTP as well. But you first need to setup LOD Manager. And also it's handy to read the RTP Manual.

Nathaniel

 

Hello Everyone,

This is the very special artistic attempt to realtime rendering in Unity3d using Relief Terrain Pack (RTP3.0 exactly). We also used Terrain Composer and AFS2.04 plus a few other asset store goodies. As most of the work was done over a year ago, new versions of the these packages were released (expect even better quality with the up to date versions).

About the water/underwater - as you probably would like to ask about it - it's a custom shading solution (not publicly available)

RTP comes with terrain surface water solution though (like it runs down the rocks when tides goes away at 0:35). You can refer to our product pages on Asset Store to know what's included and available to the community.

 

I'm sort of doing / checking in both at the moment seems to be working, although my terrain goes completely black quite a lot and I have to "Refresh All" in RTP to get it back but that's no biggie

My qiuestion is

using this splat map


you can see that Blue is the Rocks

I have 4 textures on my splat
0) sand
1) grass
2) rock
3) lava

How do I use my splat map above to assign my rock texture only to the blue parts?

please.

 

Hi, I have interest in this asset, I want to make strategy game's map like Civilization 5 style.

I think first I would make small map with this asset and place grid system(made by other asset) on that.

Is this good way?
Are there anyone who experienced made that sort of map with this asset?
Any comments or opinion sharing welcome.

Thanks.

 

Im having a problem, I added grass to my terrain which is big, 16km x 16 km and most likely set it to high amount by in terrain composer so it crashed Unity. Now every time I open up that scene it crashes Unity immediately so i cant get into that scene to change anything in terrain composer and I already did allot of work in it. How can I fix that. Is there a way to turn terrain composer of or something before you get into the scene as this is 3rd time this has happened where TC crashes scene for me and I don't want to lose all the work again.

 

I have another questions about this asset.

1. So are there anyone who tested map or game made by this asset on android, iOS mobile phone?
Any tips for optimizing? Specially for iPhone? , even iPhone 6, 6+ still uses 1 Giga ram.


2. This asset's basic principle is also unity's built-in terrain? So same performance impact with unity terrain?

Thanks.

 

I'm creating a big tiled terrain. So far I have loading splat and tree maps from images. That works great. But I can't seem to find how to do that with raw heightmaps. The auto search dropdown is there and set to the same naming convention I used for the other maps and used for the height maps. However there is no load on generate checkbox which seemed to be crucial to get it working for splat and tree maps. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

 

Hello Nathaniel.

I did some tests, the raycasting input works but I don't see a lot of things in the documentation about the several parameters.
1 - what is the difference beetween Height and Hit as raycast mode
2 - I would like to get a raycast that doesn't acts only on Z axis but in all 3 axis like a boolean operation. I tried with the Cast direction but it seems doing anything in X and Y axis.
3 - About the measure tool : could it be possible to display the obtained Height value at an overlay information following the mouse cursor (even we already have this result in the measure tool panel) ?

Regards,

hlx

 

Hello,

I explain importing splatmaps in this video:
http://www.terraincomposer.com/tutorials

Nathaniel

 

What grid system Asset would you like to use? TerrainComposer uses standard Unity terrain and yes this works on mobile, so same performance.

Nathaniel

 

TerrainComposer doesn't crash your Scene, Unity terrain does because you properly run out of memory, Unity 4.x has 3 gb memory limitation. Backing up your scene is important, although then still the Scene might crash, because the terrains are loading from Terraindata's that are stored by Unity in the project folder. I explain this in more detail in trouble shooting of TerrainComposer:
http://www.terraincomposer.com/troubleshooting/
My terrains get overwritten in my old Scene from my new Scene, why does this happen?

What you can try is from a new Scene, put the terraindata's in your hierarchy, then assign the terrain to TerrainComposer and reset the grass, in TC Terrain List -> Reset.

Can you also tell how many terrains you use and what resolutions?

Nathaniel

 

Hello,

I explain that in this video:
http://www.terraincomposer.com/tutorials/

You have to shift click >Auto Search...

Nathaniel

 

Hello, I have two questions:

1 - Is it possibile to "flat" a street layer heightmap, to avoid horizontal slopes on hills?
2 - I'd like to have more resolution on a 8x8 km terrain. In terms of memory do you think is better to have 4x4 tiles terrain with 4096 heightmap resolution each, or 8x8 with 2048 heightmap resolution each? Or is just the same?

Thank you. TC is awesome!

 

Hello,

You can look on the troubleshooting page:
http://www.terraincomposer.com/troubleshooting/

It's the second question.

Nathaniel

 

Hello,

1). Can you explain in more detail what you mean?
2). Each terrain has some overhead on performance, but on the other hand more terrains have better culling. Best is to use 4x4.

Nathaniel

 

Hi Nat and others,..

Did any of you try using Silverlining Skies with TC/RTP3 and even AFS...?? Any compatibility issues??

 

Hi.
So I am testing. How to lower Terrain Resolution below 128? And how to lower Terrain width, length in TC? When I lower width/length in unity terrain setting, it looks weird.
I want to make very small size map like Civ5 game, not terrain scale.

 

And how to lower drawcall? I made very simple default terrain using TC's example, resolution 128, minimum trees.

But drawcall over 1000, Ram usage is 0.63GB (Because this is ran on unity editor?) I am making mobile game so I worry about performance.

Any tips for optimization?

 

It seems way too much complicated.

How to just remove placed tree?

And how to lower initial generating tree's number?

(both in case of not using example, just making terrain from first manually)

 

Yes I did use it, and it works fine with TC/RTP3 and AFS. Only I don't like it because it's very heavy on performance, it eats up 50-75% of the fps, and I dug into the code and got it to work faster, but still I wasn't happy about it. Also the billboards turn if you turn with the camera on the Z axis. I recommend to use TrueSky:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/17304

Nathaniel

 

Hello,

You can change size,resolutions and reset in TC Terrain List -> Size / Resolutions / Reset tabs. Very easy to adjust...
I made tutorial video's for this:
http://www.terraincomposer.com/tutorials/

• Help Video Size
• Help Video Reset

If you want to use for mobile you can't use too many trees and need to use low resolutions.

You can use T4M with TerrainComposer to optimize your terrains for mobile and convert to meshes and use special optimized mobile terrain shader:
http://indiedevspot.azurewebsites.net/2014/03/12/optimizing-mobile-games-in-unity/

Nathaniel

 

@Nathaniel thx for optimizing tips, link.

Are there anyone who knows how to make partially apparently devided area (plains, wood, low hills, etc, but all of them positioned at similar height) like Civilization 5 map style or HoneyFramework(https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/21650) map style?

How to make those sort of maps with Terrain Composer?

 

And are there anyone who know how to cut terrain's borderline so it become regular hexagon shape? and combine them together and stitch so eventually make hexagon grid map.

 

Hi i just bought world composer and terrain composer and also rtp 3. I was trying to load the example package and created terrains and generated them as shown in the demo movie. But i had an issue with how the splat maps looks and render. Can anyone help me how to solve this

 

I'm creating 3d world environment and would appreciate if some experience terrain creator could give advice of what is best workflow between these tools (world composer, terrain composer, relief terrain pack, advance foliage shader, world machine) . What i would like to do is to grab several interesting visual focal points on real world (eg: mt kilimanjaro, some hill mountain on the border end, some flat grassland in the middle area(tileable), watery/lake area in one side, and river crossing savanna lookalike) . And then put them all together and stitch the border/edge. Then i would like to use splat map and paint them on the terrain to get the closest possible looking with the 'real' look of the original

My questions would be as follow
1) Once i grab the visual focal points using world composer, and exported them to terrain composer. And i want to do modification of heightmap by painting over it and apply splat map to it. Do i use terraincomposer or relief terrain pack?
2) is it possible to stitch these terrains together considering they are 'captured' from different spots
3) Also could anyone suggest how many tiles of terrain is the limit for it to work on ipad2.
4) it is suggested to use mesh rather than terrain for middle hardware, i would probably go down this way if necessary. I assume i will just need to reexport the terrain into mesh and optimize the mesh polygon counts (in 3ds max) and reexport it back to terrain composer. How do i do this and will i be able to paint splats maps on it and placing trees and plants upon reimport back?
5) Any tips/workflows that you guys have done especially using those tools for ipad 2 development?

 

Hello,

I already answered you by mail that I think HoneyFramework is a better solution for this, but maybe someone has tried to make this with TerrainComposer. What you for sure need is a colormap terrain shader for the hexagon image to be displayed on top.

Nathaniel

 

Hello,

With RTP3, you have to setup RTP LOD Manager in the Hierarchy to get correct terrain rendering. How to do this, Tom explains in his tutorial video (also in the RTP documentation). Both links are on the RTP Asset Store page.
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/5664

Nathaniel