CTS - Complete Terrain Shader - Deprecated

(in regards to global normalmaps):

Looked around a bit. Placing texture on material works only till you change anything in profile then material props including custom global normalmap is overwritten. Bart, for this part to work correct you need to take care about proper tangent frame transformation in relation to global normals fetched from texture. The map itself doesn't look correct, anyway - it doesn't follow terrain heightmap data and at first glance it's like you calculate integral over Unity's terrain normals given from script instead of just using normal data that can be fetched such way. Compare worldmachine global normal data vs generated by CTS. 2nd issue is global normal blending you compose global normals in tangent frame of reference (exposing surface output normal) while they are global (that is - tangent reference frame is XZ plane, not tangent direction calculated in vertex function). Other than this - it's pretty impressive how far developers like you can push visual shader editors to produce workable commercial products.

ATB, Tom

 

I bought this two days ago hoping it'd work on Android but unfortunately, it didn't work for me. I'll have to go back to megasplat but megasplat is just not easy to use.

Edited to add: I do like the product and I'm hoping the mobile support will get some focus in the future. Also, my mentioning that Megasplat is not easy to use is not a put down on the quality. It's actually fast (and looks good) when exported in my cardboard VR game. I just wish the ease of use was there.

 

When replacing my normal map with a WM normal map I noticed this as well. Thanks for chiming in Tom; it's great to see competing product authors helping each other out!

 

The wonder of Unity. It has made it possible for developers to create new innovative tools to benefit all of us. Like Tom, I too marvel at the new terrain tools that are coming out these days. I hope this continues. Our games are better for it, visually and in performance levels.

 

Would be nice if you complained about whatever issues your having on the MS thread, otherwise they'll never get addressed.

 

Sorry, Jason. Megasplat is really a fantastic product. When I saw the word "complain" I actually felt bad. I think the biggest issue is I am the only designer and developer on my game (with someone doing some 3D models) I feel a little stretched thin on the work I've been doing. I'll just need to spend more time going over your videos. I'll take this topic off this thread though.

 

Thanks for good word. New upcomming version have huge fixes in normalmaps, quality and performance. Ofc i will do more and more changes to make it better and better. As you know we had to jump over many things to create this shader - nodes are just small part of the work. Sometimes unity is cave full of poisoned snakes when we touch something. Proper input is most important and here unity build wall with arrays.

 

Hi,

We wanted to use your shader mostly to be able to decrease minimal requirements, we have tried your test scenes on about 10 configurations but on EVERY case Basic shader had about 30% fps less than Unity one. Its better looking of course but its nowhere close to being as fast as Unity. Any chance you could take a look on it? Maybe its demo issue?

 

Tommorow will be update with this what I mentioned. Many depends from gpu btw. Old gpu will have less fps probably new will get extra power.

We also made few tests with new ideas which give even better performance. We have many things on roadmap

 

How about performance in ios? Can this asset be used on mobile phones? In the description says it is compatible with metal

thx

 

We have not tried. Metal compatibility based on unity doco.

Will have to fire up my old 2012 macbook. Not even sure it will run anymore.

For those that are interested - experimental support of map magic and runtime environments is now supported. Map magic is working on my test environment.

Coming with next update.

 

OMG wow Thankyou so much for integrating with Map Magic
Can't wait

 

It does work on metal. Swamp demo on 2013 macbook pro 15 inch with gt750m in editor on metal fps:
unity: 66
basic: 44
advanced: 12
tesselation:

So it probably should work on iphones. Not sure about performance though can give it a try

 

Thank you very much for the info, the best will be to prove it

 

It does not seem to work on the iphone. Even if it did, on iphone 6s the fps is 8 using the basic shader.

http://imgur.com/a/hsENf
unity
basic
advanced

 

Wait for tommorow update. This scene had issue so even unity shader had low fps.

 

I'm just wondering if there's a way to apply snow to models other than terrain with CTS. I have Dynamic Nature as well, and was going to use that for this purpose, but if I can get away with fewer assets in the project, that would be nice.

Also, have you considered partnering with other developers to put together an 'Environment Stack' package? You know, nice assets that work well together (maybe discounted a bit if you buy them together)? I know CTS, Gaia, etc. are compatible and integrated with a number of other assets, but it would be nice to see such a package.

If not, could you recommend an optimal combination of assets to complement Gaia and CTS (Water, Weather, etc., etc.)? It can be a pain to compare so many assets and make a decision. But maybe that's just my indecisiveness talking...

 

Not really. CTS is a Terrain Tool / Shader so it will handle weather shader effects on terrain. If you want to have weather effects on Meshes or Objects you need an Object Shader tool like UBER or Dynamic Nature. Ofc it's up to Bart and Adam to decide if they want to add Objects Shaders to CTS also, but this would really be a big feature and an overkill for a terrain shader in my opinion.
Except for Mesh Blending which is something thats fit to a terrain Shader.
Also take a look to the Roadmap and you see that upcoming terrain features and optimazations are more important. A seperate Asset which fits nicely to CTS would be a better option I think. Something like an official CTS Plugin.

It's hard to recommend you something because everybody has bought different assets, has different scenarios and ideas what an asset should do and how "easy" it should be. I can just list you the assets I am using or I will use and the assets that Adam used a lot in his Demos:
- Object Placement / Vegetation: Gena or upcoming Vegetation Studio (Gamechanger already)
- Object Shader: UBER or Dynamic Nature or LUX (Free)
- Weather System: Enviro (already supported in CTS) or Tenkoku
- Water System: Aquas or Playway Water

Hope this helps

 

Hi all,


@AdamGoodrich and @NatureManufacture : Last week in a fresh project, I added up to 7 textures to a terrain and i lost around 30 fps which is quite a lot. Did the update yesterday change this?
It has the same fps drop with only 5 textures...But i will see that in depth this week end...
cheers

 

Hi,
What update you referring too?
It is still on v1.0.2

 

oups...it was written version of july 12! I thought there was an update.....

 

why do people always forget Lux?
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/16000

 

Sorry dude, I never used it and did not see it in any demo of Adam. As you can see in my response I only posted Assets which I am using and which were mentioned here.

I just added Lux to my post.

P.S: If its supports reading Smoothness (Source) out of "Albedo Alpha" or "Metallic Alpha" than I will take a closer look to it UBER is still missing this change as I am aware of which came with unity 5.4. Lot of Gameobject Assets switched to this feature. But ok thats off topic

 

From your comment you have added CTS to a standard unity terrain and then the fps went down.

This is to be expected because CTS does a lot more than the std unity terrain and this takes more calculations to compute - and these computations comes at the expense of fps. More pretty == less fps - same as with any shader. Post FX costs fps too but we all use them if our fps budget can afford them.

Our first swamp demo had a very heavy Post FX setup with SSR turned on. This was in hindsight pretty dumb and what looked cool to us and ran fine on our systems, completely tanked other less powerful systems, as the initial feedback in the forum showed.

We have tried out a whole bunch of things for the next release, and are seeing improvements across the board, however one of the interesting things we have found is that Unity terrain itself has some very nasty hard coded issues as you go over every group of 4 textures.

We have a bunch of strategies to deal with this, but chose to put the new release out because its better than the current release rather than wait another few weeks, so the good news is that even after the next release (due tomorrow), there are still more places we can look to wring out some extra performance.

When we get to where we think we can go, we think that our basic shader will be able to exceed the performance of the Unity shader when you get to larger numbers of textures, however, its a very dark art and the results can vary a lot across cards. We wont know until we have done the work and tested it.

In today's testing with the new release - in editor mode - i was getting the same performance across all the shader variants - which is pretty cool as this indicates that its not our shader, but unity that is slowing things down, and then in the release builds I am seeing increases of between 30 to 70 fps over the previous lot of demo builds.

For example in editor both the performance demos and the swamp demos give me 160fps, whereas the built demos without post fx gives me 670 fps and 356 fps. So the difference between release build and in editor is profound.

Another interesting tidbit is that the way you set your scene up makes such a difference. The swamp demo is smaller so you would expect it to be faster but its not. The nuances in optimal setup and configuration have a pretty incredible impact on fps. The swamp demo terrain size is 300x300, where as the performance terrain setup is 512x512. One is a power of two and the other isn't - and power of 2 means no interpolation where as non power of 2 means interpolation - I know in Gaia this makes a substantial difference. Bart and I have some debate about this and we will test to verify our hypothesis.

The next release includes documentation on how to configure your scenes to improve performance and we will share more as we learn more.

Another interesting point that was made by Bart is that its a crazy scale as fps goes up. So the difference between achieving 350 fps and 670 fps is actually a very very small quantum of time from a time per frame perspective - and from a game play perspective if that sort of quantum is going to kill your game, then you have far greater problems to deal with than your terrain shading. A friend of mine lost a similar amount of fps just by putting 2 houses in her scene!

We demonstrate the difference in framerate between unity and our shader in our demo's because we are genuinely curious and want a standard point of reference. It also speaks volumes to our transparency.

 

Simply because CTS has assumption of dealing with all 4 coverage splatmaps (up to 16 textures per profile). No matter they are used (when you have 16 layers used) or not (having 3 or 5 layers). This makes things easy to maintain along Unity terrain system - users want to deal with it and for example paint coverage manually here and there. So Unity terrain might be not perfect but is kind of standard and every tool that deals with Unity terrains can be used together with terrain shading solutions like CTS. The problem Adam mentioned above is that when you've got more layers Unity fires additive passes (yet another pass for subsequent 4 layers - that means 2 passes for 5 layers even if layers 6-8 are null). It's like that even if passes are not necessary (because CTS can render everything in 1 pass due to texture array usage). That causes increase in drawcalls.

But coming back on track of this post. You said 30fps drop. This info can't say anything. Dropping from 1000fps to 970fps means nothing more than CTS rendering takes as small as 0.03ms (!) more. You always need to measure performance in terms of frame render duration against frame time budget. For 60fps (which means perfectly smooth experience) it's 1000ms/60=16.6ms. So 0.03ms more means nothing. The problem with performance appears when some part of the rendering pipeline eats more than we can afford. Like multi terrain setup with 7 layers and triplanar for 2 layers turned on in advanced mode taking like 11ms. That means we've got only 5 ms left to do all other stuff (render everything, do shadows, postFXes) to maintain our budget for smooth experience.

Tom

P.S. @AdamGoodrich and @NatureManufacture - oh yes, I'm watching you both - minutely... and still I can advise users here without any direct reference .

 

Any chance to get demo build of new version?

 

As @tomaszek states it perfectly....there is much more than just measuring the difference in a small amount of frame time. Said this before and will keep saying it. And there are people who just refuse to believe and argue about 10 or 30fps.

The bottom line in all of this is....is your Quality Better and Is It Acceptable in Your Design? Is there enough budget left over to implement This Quality in Your Design to have all your other things that Must Match this Quality Level.

There is a lot of design questions to be answered from that statement and a lot of technical details that have to be covered from it as well. So don't put too much stock in FPS numbers above ~100. Better yet take a rolling average of these over 30 seconds with trees and buildings and grass and other things in the scene to get a better idea. Also turn these other things On/Off and see how they are affecting the total. In the end this is the Only way to know.

 

Thanks for this few words Hehe I feel followed We optimised advanced shader so 11ms is past, anyway we have a lot to do in this case as you probably see. There is always something that we could do to get less gpu usage. We also saw that modern gpu could give more fps even at advanced shader then unity gives.

Today or tommorow morning it will be available because we had to delay update by 1 day - nothing important . This is first update which will improve fps from few that we have in plans.

That is true that fps change from 300 to 270 etc is not important. Anyway there is nothing for free in the world. You get quality, features, control by performance cost. Ofc using first pass shaders and tricks you could improve performance or decrease impact on gpu. There is also problem with usability and performance. Some solutions gives very good access to data but they are not so fast (unity splatmaps and unity terrain standard). Ofc we could remove it and replace by other splatmaping system like megasplat have but "easy access" is our goal. We thinking about shader which is compiled version of unity terrain (no splatmap but no access at build which means it will be faster). We will see.

 

It is important when you advertice this as being "as fast as Unity", and when released material is not dropping from 300 into 270 fps but from 60 into 40,and from 45 into 35, and from 30 into 20 depending on used configuration.
Fingers crossed you can get into the same speed level !

 

Where/when did they advertise it as that? I certainly never expected equal performance.

 

@AdamGoodrich

Hello Adam.

Can you tell me what volumetric cloud system you are using on this CTS video please.
I own CTS, as I said on you-tube in my glowing "Lullaby" reply about Gaia. But am yet to fire CTS up, as having to much fun learning Gaia.

Oh and one last (double-barrelled) question please. Forgive if this is a noob question. I am a noob after-all.

Where will I find a tutorial of how to drop other assets into the random object, detail and tree spawner's please.

And do they have to be "compatible." like the 3D Forge assets. (which I really want when funds permit) Or will any rocks, houses flora etc work?

Thanks for any help.

 

For demo i used enviro sky link in movie description

Yamamototo - Depends from gpu and device as we observated in last few days.

 

@NatureManufacture

Ahh, my bad sorry I didn't see that. I do usually look in description.
Looks a very nice package.. added to the wish-list.

And Apologies I thought it was Adam Goodrich who ran the CTS / Gaia Forum, and made the videos.
Again, mea culpa.

Have you any answers, and help for the other points in my post please?

Thank you again for the help.

 

This is a GAIA specific question. Take a look to the Gaia Forum. If you follow Adams Gaia videos you will see how he is drag and droping other objects to the Detail Spawner of Gaia. It's pretty straight forward.

Gaia / CTS /Gena etc. are compatible with any Objects / Meshes / Prefabs. You can use the 3dForge Exteriors but also any other houses for your terrain. Same for trees and grasses. Gaia will just simply spawn them on the terrain using spawning rules.

Ok now back to CTS

Cheers
Ronny

 

What about the terrain 'holes'. That would be a very useful addition, or at least a simple system that would allow to add caves and underground. Right now, if I connect a tunnel, the terrain will cut it. I think anyone will have this kind of issue in a game, since we all need to have some bad guys in the underground
I think that you mentioned it in an old post? Any news about this feature?

 

It's on the roadmap:
"Transparent terrain - allows you to see into your cave systems - you will still need to manage terrain collider".

 

In next release. We already made test etc

 

Hi Eaque,
I am using Basic with 12 textures and have the same/better performances than 12 textures with Unity terrain.
The thing with CTS is that the more texture you use the more you match Unity terrain speed (plus having more features and a better rendering).
For example 4 textures on Unity is only one pass, it is the fastest you can have.
7 textures would ask Unity 2 passes, but would take the same time with CTS than 4, up to 16 textures.
And every 4 textures, Unity do another pass, ending having 4 passes for 16 textures, which will be I guess slower than CTS which does it in one pass regardless on how many texture you are using.
Now depending on how complex your terrain is, each pass is drawing the terrain. You can imagine that with a detailed terrain, having it drawn 4 times will be very slow with the Unity's terrain technique.
Conclusion, it does not make sense to use CTS with a low number of textures, but the more texture you use the more you save compared with Unity terrain.

 

Are you going to optimize and remove the unused code in this release? (remember the sqrt thing?)

 

SQRT is part of = isNormal conversion and calculating B chanel. Because normal is not RGB in unity is AG = RG + B which is combination of RG with sqrt function. If somone will remove it light data will not be correct. You will not see this at all textures but shadows will loose quality and some shapes will be rendered not correctly. This SQRT function dont take performance. The same function you have in unpack normal in every shader.

Update will be available soon (1-3 h)

 

@RonnyDance

I thank you for your reply.

As to posting about Gaia on CTS.
I was under the impression that Adam Goodrich created both Gaia, and CTS, and consequently ran both forums.

Also as my first question on my OP was about a CTS video, I just dropped the following questions in the same post.

And finally, I then apologised to NatureManufacture in the subsequent post. Who I expected an answer from.

I had no intention of offending anyone, which it seems I did to you, with my posting about Gaia here. Even though its a "sister product."
I have been nothing but polite in all of my comments, and questions. And this notwithstanding, have found the Unity forums very helpful, and civil, in realising that many of us are new to Unity. And are just trying to find our way.

I shall leave you to it.

 

Could CTS work on terrain or floor mesh instead of terrain system ?

 

I believe arbitrary mesh support is on the roadmap

 

It is
New version of asset is uploading

 

That's great.

But this means we must purchase some paiting tool to paint on non terrain mesh as Unity doesn't have any vertex painter tool.
Megasplat provides painting tools
- One of the most advanced Vertex Painting toolsets available for Unity, which allows painting of color, uvs, baking ambient occlusion, painting flow map direction, and much more.

Anyway i don't think it's CTS priority , and i am not sure enought people would use CTS on level composed of mesh instead of terrain, to justify spending time making some paint tool for CTS.


Any chances to get some grass shader specific to CTS for pigment maps that gives a lot better visuals ?
Slider 52 on presentation :
http://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/GDC2014/Presentations/Gollent_Marcin_Landscape_Creation_and.pdf

 

Hi @Dayn1..

Just because this forum is for what you assume is a sister product, it isn't good etiquette to post questions on the other products in the forum. @RonnyDance wasn't trying to offend you, but just be helpful so you could get quick support. Asset authors create separate support threads for their products specifically to keep support on the different products separate.

Also, even though the asset is listed with Adam's other assets, it is actually a project that he co-developed with @NatureManufacture. Unfortunately the asset store makes us choose one developer to post the asset under and in this case they chose to post it in Adam's for whatever reason.

Another good reason to keep Gaia questions in the Gaia thread, CTS questions in the CTS thread, GeNa questions in GeNa thread, Dynamic Nature question in the Dynamic Nature thread, etc, etc. is because a lot of us who purchased those specific products are there and happy to answer questions as we see them if we know the answers. While there are a lot of us here who use Gaia, questions about Gaia should be posted in the Gaia thread out of respect for the asset publisher and other customers within the "sister" product threads that don't own Gaia but are searching those threads for answers to problems/questions specific to those "sister" products the threads were created for.

I hope that makes sense and please don't take offense. We are just trying to steer you in the right direction.

 

To where?

 

The asset store, I strongly presume. And a bunch of quality assets have fast-track update approval on the store so once it is uploaded it doesnt take long (almost instant) to be available to customers.

 

Yep - its very late here and has been an incredibly long day... upload is happening and it should be approved quite quickly.

Here is the change-log:

v1.1.0
. Improved substance import
. Improved normals handling
. Improved file management
. Optimized texture array generation
. Reduced 3 texture arrays to 2
. Optimized all shaders
. Added remove support
. Added global normal edit in terrain
. Added shader specific bake optimisation
. Added MegaScans support
. Added Map Magic support
. Added run-time terrain support
. Added roughness and smoothness baking
. Added profile versioning system
. Added profiles library
. Added demo automation system
. Added / improved fps and metrics systems
. Fixed minor UX bugs
. Fixed tessellation dumping
. Fixed snow dumping

We have visual improvement across the board - and speed improvements in varying degrees - from 10% improvement in basic shader to about 20% improvement in tessellation shader performance in our swamp scene.

However, we wont commit to everyone seeing this as older AMD cards seem to be way slower for whatever reason. I am thinking fill rate, but could be many things.

In the new version we have beefed up the texture size in the demo scenes to 2048px, and this will have an impact on older cards, but we wanted to show them off looking as good as they could for those of you with newer cards. Drop them to 1024px and re Bake again if you have issues.

We have also included an optimization guide - please check out the CTS_Performance_Optimization file in the CTS directory.

We are also quite bullish about getting decent additional performance gains on top of this, but it will take a little time as we experiment and validate. It's both complex and labour intensive to try these things out.

NOTE: This release WILL mess your scene up - don't panic - just take a chill pill and hit Bake Textures and it will automagically fix itself! We changed the layout and format of the texture arrays to make them work better.

If you can, delete the old version of CTS before adding this one. Be sure to back your profiles up. The rest is auto generated.

In the next release we plan to drop CTS down to just one texture array. We hope this will have an additional positive impact on performance.

Will update our demo scenes tomorrow.