ats color map ULTRA shader [RELEASED]

hi killstar,

i am not sure if i get you right: the color map shader supports normal maps on every detail map painted on the terrain plus one overall terrain normal map.
so altogether there are up to 7 normal maps taken into account for each pixel.

lars

 

Lars he meant detail objects that are models placed on terrain. I was doing a lot of research year ago on this, its really sad that there is no normal map support on those detail meshes, becouse it could really improve things a lot. Do you think you would be up for something like that and add normal map support on those meshes?

 

hi janpec,

in case killstar meant detail meshes placed within the terrain engine: there is at least one shader supporting normal maps and specular lighting i know…
my advanced foliage shader ;-)
as its name already says i originally wrote it to support better foliage on the terrain – and it more or less brings all features from the tree creator shaders to detail meshes on the terrain, which are:
* nice bending
* normal mapping
* specular lighting
* translucency
* and ambient occlusion

it replaces the built in vertex lit shader which you would usually use for things like stones but of course you can set up your meshes to NOT bend in the wind and to NOT have any translucency so it will also fit for static geometry like little rocks or dead twigs and branches (well, those might bend in the wind…)




the shader support meshes painted directly onto the terrain as well as manually placed meshes, so you can have a nicely bending yucca placed onto the ground as well as a nicely bending yucca placed in a flower pot, fully light ivy on the ground and fully light ivy at a house’s wall,…

have a look at it’s basic version:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/133398-Advanced-foliage-shader-released

or the value pack shipping with much more plants:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/137040-afs-Advanced-Foliage-Package-released


lars

 

Oh thanks a lot thats good news.

 

Lars do you know why my terrain height maps are creating jittering slopes along terrain? I have tried to export in every file possible, done all raw formats possible but it creates jittering effect, is it something wrong with Unity set up settings on height map import?

 

i don’t know, but you can just send me your heightmap and i will have a look.

 

Can you elaborate a little more on how to achieve this please? Do I still have to apply the CustomTerrainScriptColorMapUltra on the terrain object? Why do all the terrains I'm creating have the base colormap from the demo scene already applied to them? Did I forget something when I imported this package within my Unity 4 project?
Is there any documentation on how to use this nice shader with Unity 4? The current documentation lacks this info.

 

Ok got it working now, first test terrain doesnt that good but it was good for practice

 

hmmm, the updated version has not been published on the asset store i think.
i have to go into this later.

lars

 

hi cygnusprojects,

i have just checked the status of the updated version 1.02 – it is still under review.
i uploaded it on october 25th so it shopuld be available pretty soon.

meanwhile you can just use the shader made for 3.x – it also works in 4.x.


lars

 

Hi Lars,

Thank you for the update, I'll keep my eyes open for the update.

 

the update to version 1.02a is now available.
it ships with native support for unity 4.x

lars

 

Thank you, imported the new package without difficulties. Time to bring my terrains to live ;-)

 

that sounds good.

lars

 

Now that Unity 4 has built-in normalmaps for the terrain textures, does it give you a possibility to add other features to your color map shader like snow?

 

not really: unity 4 brings material support to the terrain. that means that you don’t have to pass all additional texture and values like normal maps, color map, shininess etc. as global textures or global vars to the shader but can define them just in the material setup like you are used to do.
this will make it much more user friendly to work with different terrains within one scene.

as far as additional features are concerned: those are not limited by unity 3 or 4 but only by the number of supported textures samplers in shader model 3.
btw. snow is already possible with some limitations as there is only one greyscale channel left.

lars

 

If i'm fine with loosing non DX-11 compatibility, how many normal mapped textures could i use at most and what kinda performance drop should i expect? 16 is SM3 only limitation right?

 

sorry, but if haven’t looked into anything else but shader model 3 yet.

lars

 

Lars,

Just bought your package and am really.looking forward to using it with my World Machine project. However and I think this question once came up with the "normal" V2 version) I am using a tiled terrain. Is this going to work with your shader?

Thanks,
Hauke

 

Hi Lars,

I tried to Unity4 implementation but I'm having some strange issue. Seems like the terrain is overexposed. As a test setup I used all the textures and assets you provided to make sure the maps are set up correclty but still to bright... any idea on how to fix this?

How it looks:


The Unity 4 Terrain Material:

 

hi hauke,

the shader version for unity 4 work with multiple terrains just out of the box (e.g. using 4 terrains: create 4 materials, assign the shader and all needed textures and values to them, done.) – but the shader for unity 3.x does not as it already uses all available texture samples of shader model 3.
you could modify it to support multiple terrains (like i have described here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/146808-ats-Colormap-terrain-shader-RELEASED/page2) but all your terrains would all have to share the same detail textures (unlike in unity 4.x). color map, terrain normal and splat maps of course would be individual for each terrain.
as it is quite a pain to setup those terrains in unity 3.x i would rather use the unity 4.x version in case you have the chance to (or wait for the official release).

lars

 

unfortunately: not really.
but try the following:
– check your lighting
– lower specular color (or set it even to black to find out whether it is specularity or not which overbrightens the terrain)
– lower shininess
– check the imported detail in the inspector – especially their alpha channel which defines gloss

lars

 

Issue solved, note to myself: read the complete f*cking manual
Forgot to assign the textures into the terrain painting tool. Once I did that the terrain was presented as expected.

 

i am glad you have solved it – and that would have been my next guess: you will have to setup both: material and terrain.

lars

 

I've spent a very long time studying Halo 4 videos today, specifically their terrains, and it seems perfectly feasible to use something like this to get that quality - a unity analogy would be using very small multiple terrains but much a similar workflow to those posted world machine tutorial videos, certainly though one would have to get busy buying or modelling/sculpting quite a large amount of rock objects to form the cliffs and rock walls. Terrain making does mean a lot of extraassets it seems but yes well judged use of multiple small terrains would make this shader shine if what i read earlier about unity letting you alter terrain materials per terrain in 4 is true

 

well, it is true.
the picture below shows 2 unstitched terrains (that is the reason for the gap) both using their own materials and the color map ultra shader.



lars

 

Hmm, yes...

 

hi there,

here comes just the first preview on my terrain mesh blending shader and script for the color map ultra shader.
it fully supports the color map, terrain normal map, specular lighting but only 1 normal mapped terrain detail texture in order to keep it fast. so you will have to make sure that where the mesh hits the terrain, the terrain has only one detail texture that fits the one assigned to the mesh. nevertheless multi uv mixing is supported as well color correction on the mesh’s own texture so it’s easy to add cliffs to rocky parts of the terrain (watch out for the red light...).

webplayer: http://bit.ly/VMnu6K





lars

 

Very cool... how do you define the blend from the mesh to the terrain?

 

thanks.
blending is defined by vertex color red. red=1 --> terrain texture, red=0 --> mesh texture.
you can set up the vertex colors in your 3d app (like blender, modo, maya) or use a tool like reissgrant’s vertex painter extension to paint them directly in unity which is much more comfortable of course.

lars

 

Lars does this means that we do not need to use mesh blending tool from Asset store and we can just pop your script on and its working?

 

more or less: yes.

 

Hey Lars, please take a look at this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nG4k5uPHP4&feature=relmfu

Do you know by any chance how are those terrain textures created? I really like this transition between snow and dirt texture i am pretty much sure this isnt main color map becouse in that case it would be huge texture size, but maybe they are just using alpha fading on decal texture or something?

 

yes, i would say that it is some kind of decal blending.
with just a few tweaks of the color map ultra shader you can get something like this:

 

unity's api seems to indicate there's all kinds of ways to automate this process/make artist tools to do this quickly.i might be wrong but if not i might make a project of it and see, if i get stalled on anything else im working on

 

Did you just copy code out of his asset after purchasing it? That doesn't seem right...

 

are you making fun? of course NOT!
i do not even own the asset at all.
and you can’t compare my shader/script combo with the solution provided by stuasset: they have built a whole editor tool including vertex painting, whereas i have just written a small script and a shader.

 

Thats a bit unfair, i think he has proven himself if you look at all the awesome assets he has released already.

Great looking snow there, lars! At a glance it looks like a photo : )

 

..what kinda thing is that to say?

 

it's amazing shader
THANKS BRO

 

It was just a question, not an accusation. StuAssets has a very unique and expensive asset, and Lars basically just completely invalidated it. I just wasn't sure the shader would be so easy to emulate is all, since its a very uncommon technique even in AAA games.

 

Well, as said, StuAssets provides an entire toolset whereas Lars' solution, as he stated, still requires a deal of external tools, which makes it a fair competition really, although not sure how Lars wishes to distribute it.

 

Vertex painting is trivial, the real meat to that package is the shader.

Lars, will your mesh blend shader blend with all the detail maps, or only the one with the normal map? Does it need to be placed at a spot where there is 100% one detail map like you mentioned in another thread, or you've improved it?

 

right now, it blends with the color map, the terrain normal map and ONE normal mapped detail texture.
in the webplayer all meshes blend either with one of the grass textures or the rock texture (in this case the shader supports the original multi uv mixing of the terrain rock texture).
it would be possible to support all lower 4 detail textures (not all 6 though) but that would make the shader much heavier and i don’t really see the need for that as you can already define different materials for meshes placed on top of grass, meshes placed on top of sand or placed on top of rock.

lars

 

Lars thanks for detailed picture reply, this is exactly what i needed, for snow terrains especially.

 

Maybe offer the option, Lars, choice is a great thing

As an aside, and relating much to choice, is there any way to get a subset of these features working on shader model 2? Is this a question more suited to the standard colormap thread? If you could offer an SM2 version on either it would be appreciated, just for having the colormap option on top of a regular terrain shader, normalmap and specular and certainly the extra textures could be dropped etc (I'm not using a first person perspective for the vast majority so distant features arent really relevant, in fact first person just isnt imo suited to v.small scale indie games, too many assets needed). I cant say it motivates me to buy this product, i already have, but it would be very much appreciated

I ask simply because this would be extremely useful for my ideas for a planned project and i'm hanging on your terrain based shader because i'm using other terrain-based tools

 

Lars, do you think adding triplanar texturing is possible (in the free version perhaps)?

 

possible: yes – but out of my boundaries, sorry.
i have ported farfarer’s triplanar terrain shader to support mac but unfortunately it does not support soft fading shadows in deferred rendering and i have no idea how to fix this…

but using terrain blended meshes you should be able to seamlessly integrate e.g. steep slopes and cliffs – geometry you would need the triplanar shader for. so it is kind of obsolete i think (not to mention that you cannot model cliffs with the terrain tool anyway).

lars

 

dammit man !! I nearly pissed my pants when I saw what you created!! then I thought "hold it in man... does it work with Unity4 is what I need to know" so I popped over to this forum and saw with my very own eyes "compatible with Unity 4" ohhh my that was it.. i pooped.. S***ted.. and pissed my pants!!

Thanks Lars you genius !! Purchased quick time before you changed your mind!!

 

uups, i really did not intend something like this to happen.
hope your are cleaned by now… and enjoy the shader!

lars