WorldComposer a tool to create real World AAA quality terrain

You need a good terrain shader for this like RTP (the best terrain shader for Unity in my opinion) or ATS colormap shader (free). What you need to do is use the satellite image as a colormap and blend it with the splat textures, so the splat textures will give you the close up detail while the satellite image gives detail at mid and far range.

Nathaniel

 

Capture the Google map texture is not clear, can far, but near almost no details. How to solve this problem?I'm doing a helicopter game, can be in low position is very clear that the real textures, rather than looking only at high altitude.

Yes, yes, I did, I capture the satellite images and joined the "RTP".But there is a problem, because doing 'Layer - Source splats' is very difficult, choose a different texture from the satellite image area with PS.(although at high altitude on satellite images look there are many kinds of different texture, but in the near visible range can only see a texture, or although many different texture but because PS regional satellite image is not clear cause disorder) look, so lead to the near image not rich.I asked 'tomaszek', he let me ask to you, ha ha, I wait for you online oh ~ ~ [oh, yes.I now do is a helicopter project, demand is based on real satellite maps of the terrain, altitude change at any time, to land at any time.Now I'm a terrain size is 18500Meter * 18500Meter (corresponding to a satellite image is 8192 pixels), terrain a total of 16 (4 * 4)]

 

For the And I see you in the video, a city that, atmosphere and cloud volume is very good, with what the plugin?

 

There is other a problem! No matter how I adjust "RTP" parameter, only A point that is clearly visible in the distance A little place, point B is very blurred because is global satellite image, how to display the distance can reach the point C and beyond?

I put the pictures to make the video, it may be I am in China, there are limited so don't show pictures - select 1080P

 

With RTP you can control the near/mid/far blending of the colormap:



With a slight 'Distort by perlin' you can make the colormap look a bit more detailed.

The near distance values (start and fade) can be controlled in the 'Main' tab.


The far distance can be controlled in the 'Perlin normal' tab. Between near and far that's the mid distance.


Nathaniel

 

The atmosphere/clouds is from 'Time of Day' asset:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/7316

The city buildings are from the coming upgrade of Horizon[ON]:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/31861

Nathaniel

 

I have this error when trying use WorldComposer on two or more my computers. It's not webPlayer mod and yes, I've changed host to http://dev.virtualearth.net. Is the reason in WC parallel working with other computers on something else? My main computer will work about 16 hours for shadows removing with 64k texture, and if I want to make experiments with different terrains I need to do it quicker

You are trying to load data from a www stream which had the following error when downloading.

 

hiii,

i want to use world composer to create a terrain from height map and dont want to use the satellite image. Instead i want to put a tiff image(map) over this terrain. Now the problem is how can i geo reference the terrain ? How can i put my tiff file exactly in place corresponding to the location in terrain ?

Or i will put it like this,

I created a terrain to include mt everest from height maps using world composer
let the top most point be latitude x and longitude y.
Now i have a tiff map file of the region which i want to use as a texture on this terrain..
How can i ensure that the top most point on my map corresponds to the same point on terrain and the tiff file is aligned correctly ?

i am sure world composer uses the lat/long reference while downloading the satellite images. i hope this is possible

thanks

 

Extremely nice tool !

By chance, does bing maps allow to browe and extract maps from the moon or mars too ? (Maybe i'm dreaming a bit too hard )

 

hello i have recently purchased your world composer asset and i am having a problem every time i press create terrain it tell me the raw file doesn't exist even if i have already exported the heightmap and texture

 

Hi Nathaniel,

Quick questions...

1) How can I control the terrain so it is always the highest triangle resolution possible, even from afar? I need to avoid the pops of the terrain going from low res to high res because it is messing with some overlay effects that I have going on. I'm using World Composer + Terrain Composer + RTP3.

2) I also would like to pull more detail out from the satellite imagery, and suspect it is similar to the 'unitybeijingchina' posts above. Will try that as well... but I really don't want any splat textures at all. At most, I'll probably use a bit of perlin noise for detail, but not at the cost of quality... which seems to be an issue right now. (Going for a high-detailed map-like look.) Any additional tips to retain all detail?

3) As a followup to #2, is it possible to have high enough detail to use a Bing map that has road overlays on it? If so, what is the best way to get those overlays, with the highest detail possible (to make text readable)?

Thanks again!
- Woody

 

1) Decreasing the 'Pixel Error' value will make your terrain more detailed even far away, but I don't recommend setting it down to 1, depending on your application.

2) So you want more detail and not the pixelated look, but don't want to use splat textures nor perlin? If you want to retain all detail, there are some base map settings you can adjust but I think they won't increase your detail...
Splat maps or perlin really is the only option to increase detail and you don't want to use a higher basemap resolution.

3) Simply choose the highest detail level - it will automatically include all names possible to read at that level. So if you zoomed out a lot, you'll only see city names, but when you zoom in to the (near) maximum level, you'll see street names crisp and clear This is true for basically any region in the world even in those with very bad image quality.

 

Thanks Nathaniel,

1) I double-checked my scene, and already had my Pixel Error set to 1 on all 64 terrains. Unfortunately, I can see the 'popping' of the terrain in my camera view, and if I go to the scene view with wireframe, can also see the terrain polys subdividing. Is there anything else that would control this? I'm not worried about framerate at the only purpose of this application is to export stills and compile into a video externally. See image of terrain triangulation.



2) I should probably re-phrase that... not 'detail' as in 'detail map' .... more as in 'quality' of the image. Sorry. See the image comparison between the WC/TC image and Google Maps image. Maybe this will help me explain the problem better. Notice how grainy, fuzzy, and generally low-res the in-Unity version is compared with Google Maps. I'd like the terrain map a 'crisp' as possible. Thanks in advance!



3) Haven't tried this yet because I'm very afraid to completely mess up the project (I will, of course, have a backup first). I recall when I first started this project, replacing my terrains caused issues... although I probably wasn't doing the correct workflow I'm guessing. I will look into it though.

Thanks again!
- Woody

 

Oh ok, so when you want consistent polygons it might be your only option to use meshes instead (use TC1 converter). The terrain system is built for providing LOD, so disabling it is not possible afaik. MAYBE by modifying the shader, but I'm not sure. When converting to meshes you'd of coursehandle baching and every optimization stuff yourself which is very hard to get right, so you'd be better off with a third party asset oncce again... You've to decide if that's worth it for you:/
For 2) and 3): Then you definitely have to increase image resolution (zoom level in WC) to get similar results. In some rare cases Bing maps has worse quality than Google Maps though, normally equal. Unfortunately you don't get to choose your source. And backup seems like a good idea

 

Thanks again... will try those things out!

Thanks,
- Woody

 

Hey Nathaniel,

Thanks again for the help. The quality definitely improved! It was a long wait, but well worth it. Could have sworn that I had it at the highest quality already, but was wrong.

Anyway, after doing so, almost everything went great. For some reason, however, in my 32x32 grid, the x1-x17 tiles had their final image names as "...x##_y63" (instead of "y31"). As a result, you can see in the image that 18 of the tiles have no texture. I've dug around a bit to see where I can manually re-add them, but I suspect everything is contained in the prefab. I could use some advise on how to get them textured again without messing anything else up. So far, I manually renamed those texture files to have "y31" and that didn't solve itself, even with relaunching Unity.



I haven't experimented too much (just searching Inspector and Terrain Composer) because the operations take a really long time to complete and basically slow down my computer a lot. Any tips would be appreciated! Thanks much!

- Woody

 

Hey Seneral (sorry, I kept saying Nathaniel before!),

Any tips on this one? It's pretty detrimental to my project at this time. Thanks in advance!

 

I should also note that as I was researching this, I noticed that the textures I renamed actually come from one full grid square ABOVE my first terrain... in other words, World Composer appears to have pulled the textures for these 17 tiles from 1 grid outside of my terrain grid of 32x32. As it were, these textures would be better named x#_y32 instead of where they should be, x#_y31. Hopefully that makes sense. I suspect I'm going to have to once again try to redo the terrain entirely and see if that solves things.

 

Sorry but I've no clue. If you've set up everything correctly it might be a bug in WC, even though unlikely... Best bet is to ask @eagle555
Also try to reproduce this with a lower image zoom but same terrain amount to check if it's related to terrain amount or similar...
If it's one row that WC skipped you might need to redownload that part and manually fix it up or redownload the whole area (which might take a while considering your scale):/

 

Hi Seneral,

While waiting I was trying everything I could think of to manually fix it, but nothing worked. I ended up re-exporting the images and it fixed itself. I would agree, it was a bug.

Thanks anyway. If something else comes up, I'll let you know.
- Woody

 

Hi,

I have purchased the asset and have a question about how to scale down the terrain. A terrain created by World Composer can contain several terrain (parented by the same GameObject). In such a case, how do we scale down the terrain, to say 1/10?

Thanks!
Peter

 

EDIT: Aaah, nevermind! solved it! when I've built the terrain and I export it as a 8Bit RAW instead of 16BIT it imports into photoshop fine. So if anyone else has this problem, just export in 8bit.
(probably a very basic thing but I'm a newbie)

Hello, I'm having some problems with exporting the heightmap, when opening the exported .raw-file in photoshop it ends up looking like this:



While I really want a heightmap that looks like this:



Anyone know what I'm doing wrong? Has it got to do with the raw-format or something?
(all I want is to export the heightmap corresponding to the satmap I've exported, but as shown above the raw-file ends upp looking very strange. when building the terrain in Unity the heightmap seems to be read properly though)

 

Hey,

Just wanting some quick advice; What is the easiest way to separate the height of the ocean from the land?
Currently a lot of my land is level with the ocean, and editing using the Unity terrain tools is made difficult by the multiple terrains.

I'm aware I can edit the height map manually, but is there an easier way to achieve this?
Thanks in advance.

 

I have an issue when creating the terrain.

For some reason it always throws me the error: Creating asset at Path ... Failed

Also I cannot select more than 1 square that is 1km x 1km

Can someone help?

 

Is it possible to load and create maps for the Moon or Mars?

 

Question regarding heightmap resolution ....

The area I'm sampling is quite small (1km square) and in the UK so the best I'm getting on zoom level is 11. This gives me a heightmap resolution of 33 which is pretty blocky and is causing me issues with overlaying the racetrack I'm building onto it as there are some nasty angles due to the heightmap being so low res.

What process can you use to increase the terrain resolution as just upping it in Unity zeros the heightmap data. Ideally I need to size it up to around 513 and normalize it or smooth it out somehow? Any suggestions on a good reliable process for doing this?

 

Hi
We just acquired your plugins for unity, seeing a lot of potential in them.
I've started experimenting with them and a couple question arose. Please note that I'm quite new to Unity, my experience coming more from geomatic and architecture.

1. How do you "put" a World Composer terrain in Terrain Composer2? Did I miss something in the tutorial?
2. What is the specific ASCII formatting required for importing heightmap? I can have acess to different sources and I'd like to use them.

Thank you

 

This conjures up dreams of applying other height maps and textures... like Mars. I'm guessing this may be off topic and a bit out there from this project? I'll start on something closer to Earth thanks to this!

If the issue is finding and building the height maps and sat imagery, I could start there for sure.

 

No WC does not work in parallel. It can be that the bing key works only on 1 PC at the time, you can create multiple bing keys.

Also recently Microsoft Bing maps has made some changes, and you need to create a new Bing key for WorldComposer with application set to 'Public Windows App' or 'Public Windows Phone App'. These 2 have the 50.000 transaction within 24 hours, like it always used to be (so the transactions reset after 24 hours). With the other chooses there's only 125.000 transactions within a year and the key will expire if exceeding it.

A 64k texture is a bit ambitious. We talk about 64k x 64k = 11.7 GB uncompressed texture data here . To make the shadow removal algorithm work faster is that it needs to have less shadow pixels. Water is seen as shadow on default settings. What I sometimes do to speed it up is open the combined image in photoshop (my PC can only handle 32k) and do the big shadow removal with photoshops content fill tool. Just select the shadow/water area and delete it with content fill. Doing the entire image in photoshop I tried before making the algorithm and it took too much time on a 32k image and would even crash photoshop. WC does it streamed so image can be unlimited.

You can see the lat/long left/center/right coordinates of the area in WorldComposer GUI. Also you would need to have the exact same zoom level. You can open the heightmap in photoshop (I describe in WC manual how to set import settings), and then in photoshop try to fit it with your tiff image by positioning and rescaling the image.

Also WorldComposer can export world files when doing image export:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_file

No this is not possible.

The export folder needs to be within your Unity project. Probably that is the issue, if not let me know...

Nathaniel

 

What I can add to what Seneral already said:

1). RTP has a tesselation mode where it doesn't do any terrain popping, this heightmap texture file has to be manually created in RTP for each terrain tile. These are the next features I will build into TC2: Fully integration with RTP and WorldComposer. So it would mean that TC2 will automatically make those tesselation heightmap textures for RTP and you will be able to select a WorldComposer area folder and TC2 will make terrain out of it.

2). For having extremely high image resolution, you can use Amplify Texture 2 to stream it:
http://amplify.pt/unity/amplify-texture-2/

That is a very strange issue, never had that bug before. Can you show a screenshot of your WorldComposer window with WC area?

This can be done with 'Scale' parameter in the 'Create Terrain' tab. For 1/10 it needs to be put to 0.1

The heightmap texture is a 16 bit raw grey scale and photoshop supports this format. It means that it has 65535 possible elevations while 8 bit has only 255. You will loose a lot of accuracy by converting it to 8 bit.

WC heightmaps have the same format as TC1/TC2 stamps. How to import it into photoshop I describe here:
http://www.terraincomposer.com/terraincomposer2-documentation/#stamps

Yes bing doesn't include any ocean floor. I will make something in TC2 for this, that you are able to subtract a height with a mask that only has a certain height. Currently the height node can't be used in heightmap nodes.

The export folder needs to be in your Unity project Asset folder. You can set it to this folder by default by shift clicking 'Change' button.

If this is not the issue let me know...

You would need to smooth the heightmap. You can do this in WorldComposer in the 'Create Terrain' tab with the 'Smooth' button, can be clicked as many times as needed.

1). You can use a WorldComposer heightmap directly in TC2 as it has the same format as TC2 stamp:
http://www.terraincomposer.com/terraincomposer2-documentation/#stamps
For the images in the current version it doesn't work yet. But it's one of the next features I will build into TC2, that you will be able to select a WorldComposer area and TC2 will automatically create the right layers, to create a terrain out of it. It will need my custom terrain shader with global colormap. First I will integrate it with RTP.

2). I describe this in the WorldComposer manual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esri_grid

Yes mars is not included, but there are great places on earth to create terrain from , the best detail is in USA. If you find any issue's let me know...

Nathaniel

 

Hello Everyone,

I apologize for the delayed support. I worked on my workflow to improve support and from now on you can expect support within 24 hours.

Nathaniel

 

Thank you Nathaniel! I appreciate the feedback.

 

Hi how accurate is this in terms of scale xz, mine seems to a bit smaller

 

The scale is accurate. You can see it by measuring a car on a satellite image.

Nathaniel

 

Hi everybody.
Maybe a question already answered...
I have a very simple question : If I use a map made with WC within a commercial project, it uses bing imagery which is, I think, copyrighted. Do I have to pay something, rights (to bingmps maybe) if I sell an app ?

 

It's a grey area you can read about it on the first page of this forum:
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/w...orld-aaa-quality-terrain.215485/#post-1444029

I never had a customer that had issues with WC using it for commercial. I was even contacted by Microsoft for selling WorldComposer on the Windows App store. They thought it was a standalone, but after explaining that it needs Unity, they were not interested anymore.

Nathaniel

 

Hi nathaniel

I'm going to get world composer today but just wanted to check whether it can export as mesh(fbx or whatever) instead of unity terrain? are there any recommended ways of get meshes instead of terrains.

thanks keith

 

Hi am I doing something wrong? i seem to be getting very square tiles, kind of like minecraft

 

Hi Nathaniel,

I wrote you an e-mail with some questions regarding WorldComposer. We went ahead and bought a license to try it out but the questions still remain. I see now regarding the license of the maps that it is a "grey area". If you could do some work to clear this up that would be much appreciated. An instruction for how to pay for maps we download with your tool for example. Grey might work for indie game studios but not for large companies that must protect their behind for legal reasons

 

WorldComposer creates standard Unity terrain and you can use this script to convert it to a mesh:
http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=TerrainObjExporter

Can you show a screenshot? It probably has to do with image resolution, the higher image zoom level the higher the quality.

The thing is that as far as I know not a way to pay for it. I tried to contact Bing suppliers several times and they didn't even reply. I was contacted by Microsoft if they could sell WorldComposer on their Windows App store. I never heard of anyone since WorldComposer is released for almost 3 years that had issues with using it commercially.

Nathaniel

 

Hi,
do I need any integration script to use Map-ity with WC ? I have not found any instruction about the integration. Thanks

 

No you don't need to, just need to put in the right latitude and longitude into Map-ity from WC area.

Nathaniel

 

I am following World Composer multi-resolution terrain tutorial and getting some strange behaviour. This is my first time using the plugin so I expect that I must be pushing the wrong buttons.

Issue #1. When I follow the video tutorial it says "press shift then the button to process all levels" - I have been unable to have this feature work.

Issue #2. My elevation data is all over the place. For example my "level_0" data is 500m below my "level_1" data. Also, there are water areas in the terrain that are placed 1000+ meters in the air.

If anyone has had similar issues to this in the past and found a solution please let me know. I am working on a Mac, so that could be an issue as well.

Cheers,

Andrew

 

Ok. But I see that those are not aligned ...

 

WorldComposer works fine on Mac. Can you show some screenshots of the issue? Also of your WC window?

Can you show some screenshot of the issue?

Nathaniel

 

WC window. The little test bit on the dead sea is not part of the multi-terrain.

This shows height difference between 1st and second levels.

I'm thinking now I might be trying to build from an area that doesn't have any satellite data.

This is an area next to the dead sea.

 

That looks strange indeed. Can you come on skype? We can take a look into it, my account is Nathaniel.Doldersum

Nathaniel

 

Hi

I've been using World Composer with Terrain Composer for a while. I understand that TC v1 is deprecated.
However, WC still apparently relies on TC elements and not TC2 (I have bought the upgrade but not implemented on existing project).

I'm having an issue with 2 things. I hope you will still help
1) the folders of some objects in TC appear to be 'hard' selected to the specific drive on my desktop machine. I can't tell why this is but it means moving the project to my laptop makes some things broken. I don't think I did anything to cause this but it appears to be done by the asset.
2) I'm having trouble getting 2 WC terrain tiles to stitch with TC's 'stitch borders' function. I have had no bother in the past but I get this error message now in the Console:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ArgumentException: Trying to access out-of-bounds terrain height information.
terraincomposer_save.stitch_terrains (Single border_influence) (at Assets/TerrainComposer/Scripts/terraincomposer_save.js:9845)
TerrainComposer.stitch_terrains () (at Assets/TerrainComposer/Editor/TerrainComposer.js:16555)
TerrainComposer.Paint () (at Assets/TerrainComposer/Editor/TerrainComposer.js:2809)
TerrainComposer.OnGUI () (at Assets/TerrainComposer/Editor/TerrainComposer.js:922)
System.Reflection.MonoMethod.Invoke (System.Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, System.Reflection.Binder binder, System.Object[] parameters, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono/build/mcs/class/corlib/System.Reflection/MonoMethod.cs:222)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Is there any way to sort this. Otherwise I'm stuck trying to align the two terrain tiles manually :/

thanks
Tim

 

Hello, for number 2 there is another option, though it does cost $5; yet if time is a limited resource, it could help with moving forward... Terrain Stitcher: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/42671

 

Thanks Akshara. Frustrating thing is that TC has previously worked perfectly for this. I don't know what it is now not working.