Terrain Composer2 a next generation GPU powered terrain tool.

Spoiler: What I Want...

This is a color map at the end of the tutorial...both color and image data is exported.

In your videos....How did you get the satellite image into your color map?.
How do I get my Splat Textures, into my Color Map?

This what I am asking..

Spoiler: because this isn't it.

Spoiler: From This....

p-

 

That sound SO COOL, Nathaniel!! I am so looking forward to an easier way of setting up biomes

With regard to the heightmap streaming (which is REALLY exciting), does that mean that TC will stitch together all your tiles into one massive heightmap? What kind of visual radius will you be able to set? Does that mean that editing terrain over tile boundaries will be less messy? (Oh, man this is very exciting news!)

Oh ... one question I have regarding RTP and TC integration. Does the color map creation use the RTP color maps or does TC create its own?

 

I love TC but i have a problem
i would like to place objects (a whole base for example) exactly on time on the terrain without clipping or other artifacts

whats the best way to this?

and just to clarify: runtime use of TC is possible? (for procedurally gened levels)

 

Since you have mentioned TC2, I would like to volunteer to beta test it. If you would like that, please PM me the details.

 

Hi,

Some quick questions:
1) Do you have an estimated release date for TC2? (for example Spring 2016?)
2) What will happen to the development and support for TC1?
3) Will TC1 users get free or discounted upgrade to TC2?
4) Will there also be a WC2 or will WC1 work with TC2?

Thanks.

 

Something is confusing me.

Here are my terrains in Unity. _x0_y0 is in the upper left and _x2_y2 is in the lower right.



But in the TC tab, the grid is reversed, with 0,0 on the bottom left and 2,2 on the top right.

 

What is wrong when the generated terrains look like this?



Tried restarting TC but it´s the same.

 

Hi again.

So, I've been trying to use TC to mass-place grass on my terrains but I'm getting this odd error you see below.





I've told TC to place the grass only on one splat texture (the one with grass) to keep it from placing grass on dirt or on the steep slopes of rocky-textured hills and mountains, so I believe the error is that TC is not blending in or out at all, or something to that affect.

What's going on and how do I fix it?

Thanks.

 

Greetings,
I'd like to have a Tool which helps me creating and designing my World
without the Necissity of learning how to program.

I looked around for some time now but basically only found stepping stones
which require me to dive deeply into mathematics and programming
or some amazing looking and/or badly supported and/or hugely expensive System.

A few weeks ago i stumbled about this then, which looks very good and lies within
my budget, however, being new to this, i still need to be sure about some aspects.
It would be great if you, the creator and you, the experienced users could maybe
help me with some questions i have.


1. Do i need Unity Pro for Terrain Composer?
Or only for advanced functions of Terrain Composer?
Or not at all in any way?

2. Ideally i want to have a big procedurally generated world for an RPG.
It does not have to be infinite if it is quite large, like, let's say...
Great Britain. Can i create that with Terrain Composer alone and if not,
do i need also World Composer?

3. The Terrain that TC produces, is it deformable, destructable?
Or better asked, is it at all possible to dig holes into it,
maybe with some additional scripting extension?
I plan to use a ressource system with mining. Digging seems to me
more realistic than placing ressource-"dispenser"-objects on top of
the terrain.

4. Is it possible to create planetary, spherical terrain with TC?
Or use TC as an additional tool in such a project?

 

I see a mention of TC2 and that leads to a question.

What is the plan, will those who own TC have a free update to TC2 or will be required a new purchase?

Should I want for TC2 or am I safe making a purchase today?

 

I may be able to help you here. This looks similar to the striped grass sections problem I was getting a getting on the past page. Try reducing the strength on your mask incrementally. If you notice the size of the empty parts getting smaller, keep doing so until the blank buts disappear. I had to reduce the strength on one of my mask down to 0.8 and the problem went away.

See here for my original post.

As to why ... sorry, no idea.

 

I may be able to help here. I'm working on a project similar to yours.

No. The difference between Pro and Personal (as far as I can tell) is licencing. With Unity 5, the only restriction is that you need to buy Pro if your project earns a certain amount of money. I'm using the full power of TC just using the Personal version.

Two words: World Machine. It generates heightmaps and splatmaps for large tiled terrains. You then use those generated tiles and import them into Unity and TC. If you want LARGE areas, you will have to buy the pro version. It's a big ask for a hobby project, but it's well worth it. I haven't looked back. There are other solutions out there, but none as feature rich.

The only caveat I'd put on that is if you want to do things like destructable terrain (see below), you may want to examine other solutions rather of using heightmaps to generate your terrain. You may end up having to do a LOT more work hand crafting your terrain though.

No. TC only deals with terrain meshes and putting down textures, tree's grass and objects procedurally. If you want to do destructable terrain, that's a whole different kettle of fish. You may want to look at a different (voxel based) solution. Ultimate Terrains (on the store) lets you do that; it was one of the assets I first looked at but I know it doesn't let you import tiled heightmaps generated in World Machine, so it didn't work for me.

Planetary Terrain (in the store) does ... well ... planetary terrain. I don't think it has anywhere near the features as TC and I don't think it will let you import heightmaps.

 

Thanks for your reply but that isn't a real solution. The only thing you're doing there is gradually reducing the density of your grass until it isn't noticeable, but that solution won't allow you to keep the actual density of grass you're paying for with a high grass map size.

I'd like Nate to weigh in on this when possible.

 

Hi Nathanial,

I have a feature request for TC2. One of the problems I have with using heightmaps as inputs is that they don't handle sheer cliffs very well. You end up with a really smooth mesh where the cliffs are. That's just the nature of how heightmaps work.

What I'd like to see is to somehow do a "second pass" that allows you to add noise to the terrain mesh generation based mesh calculation before generating the actual mesh. That would allow you to add additional noise to the initial pass .... including filters and masks based on steepness and height ... and you could end up with more "bumpy" cliffs (or other parts of the terrain depending on what the developer needs).

Thoughts?

EDIT: One more question. Is it possible to assign more than 8 textures if you're using RTP? I noticed that once you do, RTP breaks.

 

No problem. It's the only solution that worked for me. I don't know if it's a bug in Unity or TC, but all the terrain I've generated have had similar issues. It may be an interim solution until a real solution can be found.

 

Planetary Terrain is broken and abandoned at this time.

 

The splat textures you can't get into a colormap, because this are rendered on the GPU with a special technique called splat mapping. They are repeated many times over the surface. E.g. if they are tiled a 100x the resolution of the splat texture is also 100x bigger. If you use a 1k splat texture, what you see on screen will be 100k resolution.

As for getting an image into the colormap. Just put 'Filter' input to 'Image'.


Nathaniel

 

Yes something like that will be possible.

With TC you can create colormap and RTP can render them. Unity's terrain shader doesn't support a colormap, I found a bit of a hack were you put a colormap as a splat texture and use tile size the size of the terrain (TC does that with the <Colormap> button). The downside is that is works as a splat texture and this is additive, while RTP multiplies the splat result with the colormap, giving much better results.

That's a bit tricky. TC is great for spawning all kind of detail objects like rocks and trees on a terrain. When it comes to placing buildings what works now is using ray casting, first you generate a heightmap, then you generate the objects, then you need to generate the heightmap again using ray casting that cast against the building floor to flatten the heightmap (Raycasting is explained on page 31 of TC manual). In TC2 placing buildings will be very advanced.

That are good questions. Yes you can beta test TC2 when it will get into beta stage.

1). Its hard to estimate, I hope before the end of next month.
2). The development will discontinue, support of course will continue.
3). Yes either one of the 2, I'm still thinking about it.
4). WorldComposer I also converted to C# so this needs to be upgraded as well.

Yes auto search from WC to TC doesn't work at the moment. I changed TC's tiling system to be compatible with WM's, it also needs to be done for WC. The fix for this is a bit delayed, because I'm working on TC2.

In TC terrain list -> Local Area -> click the 'Max' button and then shift click >Set All. That should fix it.

Can you show a screenshot how you setup the mask in TC's grass layer? One way to improve the distribution using placement on splat texture is to use a higher splatmap resolution.

Thanks Tovrin for helping to answer the questions .

That are good questions:
1). TC works from Unity 3.5.6 with Unity free and Unity pro.
2). For real world terrain you would need WC. For very realistic erosion hand crafted heightmaps I agree with Tovrin to us WM for it and import with TC.
3). TC uses standard Unity terrain, and Unity terrain supports deformable and destructable at runtime. However keep in mind that Unity terrain uses a 2d heightmap and the terrain height is the only thing that can be changed, it's not like a voxel terrain engine where you can create tunnels and overhangs. The advantage of Unity's terrain is that it is very performant compared to voxel terrain.
4). No this is not possible because Unity terrain uses a square grid.

That doesn't work with Unity terrain as it uses a grid that exactly matches with heightmaps. The advantage of this system is that Unity's terrain collider is very fast.

Yes that can be done RTP can use 12 splat textures, 8 have to be combined into 1 pass, it's explained in the RTP manual.

Nathaniel

 

I'm testing out applying grass to my terrain. It's a fairly large map and when I apply the grass the density is so spread out that it's as if it's trying to place it as trees rather than grass. I've maxed out the strength and played with filters but I can't increase the grass density, I can only decrease it. I upped the resolution and that worked sometimes, but now it's not working again.

I'm also getting the "square" blocks of grass when approaching areas that aren't layered.

 

Thank you Tovrin and Nathaniel for your Answers.

For Clearance, as i mentioned Great Britain in my Question #2,
i only meant to refer to the Size of the Terrain, not the Shape or any
Real Life Features. I should have been more clear about that.

I now think that using Heightmaps instead of Voxels is the Solution.
Especially since TC also allows randomized placing of Objects.

Although i can see the future benefits of something like Terrain Composer,
For my RPG i just need something to RP upon, so to speak.
Similarily, if you paint a Portrait, the Type and Quality of the Canvas
and Paint is important, so it has to be chosen wisely.

My problem is that choosing would result in either buying a Heightmap-solution
which costs (in my case) quite some money, assuming that after the next
big update, TC-ONE will probably be back to 90 Bucks, or quite some work
because there is no Voxelsolution out there that is good -and-
up-to-date, meaning i would have to create my own Engine.

To not be misunderstood, I would not mind quite some work, if i actually
would be able to -do- it, I am not looking for an "out of the box-game".


Are there any precise km²-values for how big a Terrain can be that is made by
Terrain Composer -without- having to use World composer?
According to Wikipedia, Iceland is ~100,000 km² big, which, i think,
would be sufficient for a single Landmass in an RPG.

 

Hi Nathaniel,

Just a little feature request :

Adding a slider or something to control the length of the falloff for the grass density, when managing with the grass distance, would be very nice.
Same thing with the height falloff for the grass would be very nice too.

When working on the optimisation of a project, having those two features could help people to manage the blending between the grass and the terrain textures.

If it is not clear, please point it out to me and I will try to explain it better.


TC is, from far, my favourite asset, so I can't wait to put my hands on TC2.


Sorry for my english.

 

Hi, I'm new here, this asset is great, I love that out-of-box package. Is there any place I can get more packages or quickly make one? Thanks

 

In the Resolutions tab, there is the Grass Resolution. Maybe try to increase this value.

 

Zhuchun, Hello and Welcome
Up-to-Date Links to the Assets you find talked about here in the Forumthreads are often
to be found on the first Page and in the first Post and/or in the Unity-Asset Store.
( https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/7065 )

 

Hi, thanks for the reply
Sorry for my misleading words. In fact I wanna know what kinds of packages can be use in TC directly(like that example package) and where to find them

 

@eagle555 I just wanted to let you know that TC and WC both cannot be imported when assets are in Force Text mode. I need to import them to a clean project in Mixed or Force Binary mode, then change to Force Text to rebuild them, then export them, then I can import to my real project in Force Text mode. This is using Unity 5.1.2f1.

 

Hi Nathaniel,
After such a long time I am back to TC. I need a few tips from you on optimizing for Mobile, not just any mobile but just for Galaxy s6 as I am planning to develop a game with a huge terrain, Highways and lots of Vehicles. This would be a GearVR app.

1. how to inplement the mobile shaders
2. would SECTR budnle help me here
3. Just need the Terrain big, cheap but still have trees and some grass.
4. Rather use meshes or terrain?
5. Any tips you may have on workflow or third party assets.
Thanks
Chris.

 

Thanks, but I already tried that. I even went up to 4096 with 8, 16, 32 and 64 grass per patch. Still no luck. There's only like 1 grass model like every 10 feet.

 

Do you use an image to place your grass ? If yes, maybe increase the resolution of the image.

 

So. It's been a while for me...

Got this weird error: Fog I cant remove?




There is no fog turned on anywhere?






any clues anyone?

I double checked Global Fog is off. There is no fogs on Cam.

thanks

 

I've seen this before as well. You're using RTP3? From memory it was a distance setting in there. Sorry I can't be more specific; I'm at work and can't really check, but if you play around with some of the settings terrain settings in RTP3 (as opposed to LOD manager), I'm sure you'll find it.

 

Thanks man. yes RTP as well.
Sigh... Many hours wasted... Hero you are.

I tried to reset everything to no avail....
Will go play again. GAH. Not a great 1st day back. huh

Will post on the right thread

 

Additionally I would like to volunteer for Beta Testing.

I have done such a task before.

Much obliged

 

Is there a way to use an image in a mask that works with just a single channel of the image so that i can specify a color range just for that channel. I have various zones that I pull in from world machine using channels of an image and they represent different things and overlap. If I generate separate images say just using red and use the color range black to red it works. I want to do the same thing but no have to make all separate images.

 

When a lot of trees are generated on my terrains, my first person controller will fall through as if the terrain collider isn't working. Has anyone had this problem? Is there a way to fix this?

 

Unity version? Assuming 5:
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/135299/first-person-controller-falls-through-terrain-in-w.html

Pretty much it says "Is Buggy, try these steps..."

 

I'm using 5.1.2
It only happens when I generate trees with terrain composer otherwise I don't fall through.

 

After few hours with Terrain Composer, I believe best way to get based terrain composer to work with old Mobile terrain is the following steps(we are talking about old Opengl es 2.0 devices).

1. generate your terrain and start painting your terrain(no trees, just based textures)
2. then afterwards, export your terrain as .Obj(which you are able to choose the downsized resolution, multiple if you need LOD), this is under quick tools.
3. then afterwards, you are also able to export splatmap, buy selecting both splatmap and export button.
4. having done all that, you can unzip the mobileshaders in terrain composer, and then puzzle back everthing together inside of unity and using their LOD system if needed.

 

good hello, I have a problem, I made a map of 8196x8196 and have not just trees and grass does not have grass, I added the herb that has default and still does not appear, do not quite understand how I can do to have a lot more grass and more trees. I've watched the video tutorials and nothing, please help.

 

What is your terrain size exactly? In the 24 hour demo we used a grass resolution of 8192 and about 5-7 grass textures to get the density. If you add another grass texture it gives double the resolution.

Creating your own voxel-engine is very tricky. Think the best way would be to combine Unity terrain with meshes to get caves and overhangs etc. This can be done with RTP.

There is no limitation in terrain size and how many terrain tiles, it's the resolution that has the memory and performance cost. The max I tried are 4096 terrain tiles. Of course this would need to be loaded/unloaded as each terrain tiles has a little overhead but on the other hand better for culling. So I recommend stay with tiles like 5x5.

TerrainComposer doesn't need WorldComposer to create huge terrains. WorldComposer is for importing real world heightmaps and satellite images.

If you mean the grass density settings on the terrain settings. This is handled on Unity's side. Changing this at runtime is causing drops in frame-rate. If it's about placing grass this feature is already build and you can use the normal curves for this. Curves give a very precise way to manage falloffs, that why I build them in the filter/mask system.

Anything that you make in TerrainComposer can be saved (and loaded) in TC menu -> File -> Save. The TerrainComposer project is saved as a prefab and it can be shared with other users. I don't have any more examples projects then the already included. For TerrainComposer2 I will make new ones and probably more.

Thanks for telling. Yes this is because of a serialization bug in Unity when importing prefabs from an older Unity version. I hope they will fix this.

No this is not possible at the moment, so for now you need to use an grey scale image for that represents a channel. I will add this to the TerrainComposer 2 feature list.

How many trees do you place? It can be a collider issue that causes physics collision to work. Do you get any errors in the Unity console?

If you want a big and good detailed terrain then streaming for example with SECTR is helpful. It's best to do testing what gives best performance. The issue with meshes is that there's no LOD heightmap system system and no tree/grass billboard system. So in your case it might be better to use Unity terrain as meshes can run faster on a small terrain.

Using the mobile terrain shaders I included is how FuzzyChan explains. You can create a material in your Unity project and assign the mobile shader, then you need to assign all textures. The splatmap can be exported with TerrainComposer by enabling 'Splat' and 'Export' button in top of the TerrainComposer window.

To increase grass resolution you need to go to TC terrain list -> Resolutions and higher grass resolution, then shift click <Set All>.

Nathaniel

 

thx man now i have grass jejeje, now i have other problem, i put many tree, and now terrain collider not work, i save the scene and reload and nothing, i have unity3D 5.1.2f1, not errors in Console

 

So what I'm needing to do is put four different types of environment in one "tutorial" landmass, and I already got it all setup and working as i want in world machine and importing the terrain into TC worked as usual. But the one brick wall ive hit is that, although what you're looking at is the colormaps working correct, I don't actually know how I can do the splatmap stage like this to replicate separate environments.

I have 12 texture slots available through RTP. What I want to do is have TC choose between textures based on the quadrant (upper right, lower left, etc) so that the cliffs textures being applied in (for instance) the bottom right are different from those being used in a totally inappropriate area for them, such as the top right (red) section.

Thanks

P.S I know you're going to say "use a filter or mask to accomplish this" but what I need to know is specifically what to do. Thanks again.

 

I'm trying to use procedural islands example tool to generate random terrains, but I have a strange problem with stitching. All settings are set by default. Clicking Stitch button at this point makes things even worst.
Any advice how to fix that? Here is screenshot:

 

Hi there Im a new owner of terrain and world composer, im getting to grips with the system, really cool, but im having an issue with the default trees they are very dark and the leaves sparkle, like the screenshots on the earlier page, anyone got a fix for this ? im using unity5 pro

 

hello I have a map 8196x8196 and when I generate grass, there are extremely little, I have set as you commented on the resolution to maximum and also the grass patch and no way to increase the grass, which I can do?

 

World Streamer is on sale today, and seems to work pretty well, I'm making a large terrain , with Terrain composer and decided to buy World Streamer, its better than what I made for mobile so far..

 

Hi Nathaniel and all just bought Terrain composer and it looks awesome.. how ever the link in the terrain composer to download the manual does not work and i cannot find it on the website.

I am using a mac with latest unity.

Would be great if the upgrade to tc2 is free as just splashed out..

Thanks

 

Hi,
I'm interesting about your package; before purchasing it, I'd like to know if a terrain created with your Terrain Composer needs scripts or any sort of object attached to it for correct visualization.
I ask this because I'm going to sell my personal 3d model environment in Asset Store which has a terrain in scene and I would not like to have any dependencies.

Thanks

 

An other question...
I have textures with albedo, normal map and all other channels from PBR material; which channels can I use with TC without have to purchasing package like RTP?

 

I am pretty interested about TC2, I gave up using TC1 because of outdated tutorials and the UI not very user friendly.
how different from TC1 TC2 will be ?