[RELEASED] Landscape Auto Material terrain&foliage toolset

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LandscapeAutoMaterial (LAM) is a comprehensive toolset for terrain and foliage creation. It's a reimplementation of a popular Unreal Engine 4 tool in Unity. With LAM, your terrain is textured automatically according to height and slope, and grass and detail meshes are added automatically according to complex weighting rules. And, of course, you can reconfigure and override any and all automatic settings.
LAM includes a preconfigured forest setting, with several trees, grass and rock meshes. Just put one prefab in the scene - and start painting!

See the process (and results) in this video. All assets you see here are INCLUDED in the package.

LAM feature list:
Terrain shader

• A set of custom physical-based terrain shaders
• Automated terrain texturing based on slope and height, with full override ability.
• Height-based layers mixing
• Triplanar texturing support, eliminating “stretching” on slopes
• Multi-UV mixing to reduce repetitive tiles in distance
• DX11 tessellation support.
• Additional coloring map to reduce repetitiveness
• Paintable coloring layer - paint color directly on terrain

Foliage shaders

• Custom tree shaders with wind animation and leaf translucency, working with both built-in and prefab-based trees.
• Custom grass shader with translucency and texture-based wind animation.

Advanced foliage painting

• Multi-foliage brush tool that can paint several foliage types simultaneously - including mixing grass and trees.
• Auto-painter system that intelligently places foliage based on terrain textures, slope, and noise mask, with almost-realtime updates.

Custom foliage system (FoliagePainter Pro)

• Fully custom system allowing painting meshes on terrain
• Supports any shader, not just the ones included in package
• Automatically batches foliage instances for draw-call reduction
• Supports fully-static and runtime batching
• Can be used to paint ANY prefab on terrain - lights, particle effects, etc.
• Fully supported by advanced painting tools in the package.

The package is available from our website: http://www.veagames.com/#!blank/ksk19 and Unity Asset Store: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/64132

 

Looks interesting... How about streams and rivers, and what is performance like over vanilla unity terrain?

 

We don't have anything for streams out-of-the-box right now, but most other river tools should work with LAM - it's just terrain after all.
As for performance, vanilla terrain is probably faster, but that's not really a fair comparison - LAM looks a lot better and is richer in features.

 

Has it been tested with SpeedTree trees?

 

You can place ANY trees you want - custom meshes, SpeedTree, Tree Creator trees, whatever, either through built-in terrain mechanism or our custom BatchedFoliage script (the latter won't batch trees, though). And once placed they work as usual, nothing special there.

 

What Unity version have you submitted with ?

 

We used version 5.3.0

 

Hi,

Is there anything in specific that requires that version or do you know if it will work on older v5X versions.
If you look at the only STATS we have available you are possibly eliminating MANY possible sales.

I personally would have wanted a v5.2.2 in the least and that would very likely add many more possible sales.

You can submit with multiple version.
The users will get the one that he is attempting to buy/download it with.

Many assets gets submitted with the latest version or to new a aversion and then they dont get the sales they wanted and gives the impression that the package is no good and fails as a product.

Cheers
Cobus

 

That's pretty old data, and right now most people are probably on 5.3
That said, we really should investigate compatibility with older versions - we hadn't yet. There's a good chance LAM would work with 5.2.2 or even older.

 

You enlarging the pool of possible users that would want to buy the package, so will be good

 

This looks pretty awesome and useful. Nice work!

Read on your website something about a winter (and other) pack(s) available for Unreal engine. Will these packs also be available for Unity? If so, when do you think they will be ready and also, will these be sold as a seperate package, or free (as updates to LAM)?

It also looks like the grass/vegetation has shadow support? Are the grass/vegetation meshes following the terrain slope angle?

Cheers,
Chris

 

The packs will be available for Unity, but I can't give any concrete dates right now. They will be done when they're done (-8
The packs are going to be in separate packages.

All grass can cast shadows. This is one of the main reasons why we had to build a custom foliage system: so we can use grass with more advanced shaders. In fact, LAM allows use of absolutely any shader on foliage - PBR, shadows, translucency, whatever. Of course, shadows come with a performance cost.

As for the slope - yes, there's a "slope following" value in our foliage system that defines whether given mesh angles with the slope or not. It goes from 0 to 1, so grass can even be set to kind-of lean towards terrain slope, but not completely.

 

Is the resultant terrain a plain, scriptless, Unity Terrain, or custom mesh with or without controlling scripts?

 

Looks really awesome!

From what you have written your product uses shaders to do its magic.

Does it also work with the underlying Unity texture, detail and height structures ? If it does then I would love to explore integrating it with Gaia.

From what I have seen this will be awesome for lovely detail work but 10k x 10k of brush work might be tedious.

Feel free to reach out if you would like to collaborate.

 

It's a Unity Terrain, but with several scripts attached. There's more info in the manual (which is available here), but briefly, there are 3 scripts: TerrainTool to support terrain shading, AutoPainter to support automatic foliage placement and BatchedFoliage which is our custom foliage system. All can work independently (i.e. you can choose what parts of the system you want); and the first two only work when changing terrain, so you could concievably build the terrain and then remove them.

Yep, it does! We do this sort-of-weird thing where the first splat texture on the terrain is never rendered, but used to mark automatic texturing areas, and we add a few more textures to the Unity-recognized ones, but other than that it's all built-in textures, splatmaps and heightmaps.
Meaning that it should work with heightmap and splatmap editing tools like Gaia out of the box.

Well, the idea of this tool is that you don't really need lots of brush work - most of terrain is textured and covered with vegetation automatically, and then you provide the lovely details.

 

Hmm.. well I don't see us as competitors, more as potential collaborators with tool-sets that have different strengths, and most people like more options rather than less. Offer is open any time

Anyways, staying out of your forum now - apologies if it was seen as an intrusion. Keep up the awesome work!

 

VEAGamesTeam, I would love to see a GAIA integration personally. As mentioned previously, it would be great to auto-generate large terrains using GAIA and then run LAM to automagically apply all of the extra shaders, etc. Obviously, you can always go into the Terrain menu to fine tune things.

As Adam mentioned, I think collaboration would be very powerful since you are two different tool-sets. If an integration is not possible I would love for you to possibly help me out with a workflow that would help me be able to use GAIA with LAM.

Thanks

 

Yes, with integration, as they do different things, I would definitely buy.

 

Wanted to say thanks to the author - I am exploring integration - think the combined result will be super cool

 

I have just seen this and I have to say it looks awesome! Cannot wait to use it.

 

FYI your copy of the mouselook class is in the same namespace as Unity's (UnityStandardAssets.Characters.FirstPerson) so they conflict and throw a compile error.

[Edit] I see, it's just a copy. I'll just delete it.

 

It's the same class as in standard assets - you can delete it in case of any conflicts. Thanks for the report though, changing namespace to prevent this conflict might be a good idea.

 

My initial impressions...very nice! The terrain looks especially good, with the height based rocks. I'm glad that the demo scene contains everything you showed in the videos.
If there was one thing that kind of stood out, that could probably use some love...the shader you have on the distant trees is great for wind animation, however the bottom of the tree trunks sways back and forth also, so it looks like the entire tree is dancing

Also...the floating dandelion seeds is a nice touch

 

Nice

it is compatible with RTP ?

 

That's cool!
How long does it take to review?
I can't wait

 

Hey there,

I bought the LAM toolset to add more variety to my toolbox for demo scene building.
I just pulled in LAM and the Village Exteriors Kit, dropped some of the pre-done houses in,
painted the ground to match up to the building entrances and added a few props
These were all dropped into the demo scene that comes with LAM.

Just wanting to show the results










Cheers
Cobus

 

How would this work on multi-tiled terrains? If I take a large terrain and split it into tiles, can I easily apply your shaders and materials to the tiles?

 

I think terrain shaders are not compatible with RTP, by virtue of being, well, terrain shaders. The foliage, including auto-palcement functionality, should work with RTP, but you'd have to set it up from scratch - as demo setup is aimed at LAM shaders.

LAM does not depend on there being only one terrain in the scene, so it should work with multiple terrain tiles. We haven't tested it yet, but rest assured: if LAM has problems in this setup, we'd do our best to solve them!

 

I am waiting on the release of TC2 beta which should be next week hopefully. I want to make sure I am not replicating anything major. However, having looked through your manual, and talking with Cobus, I really want this.

I love the shaders...although I worry about performance hits but they can't be too much worse than what I use now. I love the fact that you can set your quality settings and have them automatically applied. I also love the paint features since even though I use programs that paint the entire terrain, I like to hand craft specific areas to make them special.

So...I will check back in a week or so. Thank you!

 

This looks absolutely amazing. Are there any special restrictions for using this? I develop for the Wii U and am wondering if there would be any reason it might not run on that target. This is almost an instant buy for me, but I don't want to buy and find it doesn't work on Wii U or performance is so bad that it's unusable.

 

Can you explain this a bit more? This sounds like it doesn't use the Unity terrain tree and/or grass systems. It sounds like a custom solution designed for better performance. I'd like to understand more about this and how it works. I'm hoping it could help solve some performance issues.

 

Well we don't have any way to test on Wii U, so I'm not sure about anything, but: the most advanced terrain shaders with tesselation require DX11 or GLCore. They probably won't run on WiiU, but we have a somewhat restricted terrain shader that works on DX9 - it would probably be OK.
The foliage shaders do not depend on advanced features, but they're kind of complex - they would probably run, but I'm not sure about performance. We do have quality settings system, though, that may help with that - or you could just switch to built-in shaders while still using our auto-paint functionality.

Yep, that's exactly what it is. We have our own custom foliage system (that will be available as a standalone package sometime in the future). This system basically places meshes over terrain, using the same detail maps as built-in grass. It can simply place prefabs - that's how trees work, or the dandelion seeds in the demo. Or it can place meshes and then combine them into batches, so that instead of 100000 draw calls you only have 500 or something. The draw call number is pretty close to what built-in grass achieves.
Our system can also be set to only create foliage meshes at runtime - because saving them all with the scene can make it prohibitively large. With runtime mode, only the meshes around the camera are created. This mode can be set per-foliage (i.e. you can have static trees but runtime-generated grass). There's also a setting for performance budget for mesh creation: you can set it low to only spend, say, 5 ms per frame on foliage creation, and have grass appear slowly, but without much effect on performance, or set it to 20 ms and have grass appear a lot faster, if you are not doing anything CPU-intensive anyway.

Note, also, that our foliage painting tools can work with built-in grass and trees too. If our custom system does not work for you for some reason, you can skip it and still take advantage of foliage auto-painting and multi-foliage brush.

 

I want to buy such a great package,But it's too expensive for me.I am a freshman in China,That's my month's living expenses...I will come back

 

Hi,

Same included Demo scene, added Aquas by @dogmachris for water and dropping in some pre-done buildings from the Village Exteriors Kit







Cheers
Cobus

 

Asset looks great.

Does LAM work on Playstation 4 and Xbox One?

 

We don't have any way of testing that, sorry. The more complex terrain shaders are set to only render on DX11 and GLCore. They might work on consoles, but you'd have to enable renderers in the shader yourself. Foliage system should work out of the box, but again, we did not test it.

 

Please we need more infos and input screenshots and movie clips about LAM please

 

real need some tutorials - looking forward to those

 

Just puchased and installed LAM. First impression on installation (which I won't let influence any review); the install is badly put together with the LAM folder being inside the "Plugins" directory which is a special Unity directory for DLL files. This also contains a copy of a "Standard Assets" folder which should not be included within an assetstore package.

Apart from almost everything being wrongly in the Plugins folder, there is also a root folder named Editor Default Resources which contains 2 png images.

I would suggest a root folder called "LandscapeAutoMaterial" with everything within subfolders except the Unity StandardAssets (which don't seem to be used by LAM at all).

 

Actully, we consider this a good way to package the tool. This is what this thread recommends, and we chose to follow its example. The Plugins folder is not just for DLL files - it's for any code that should be compiled in first (plugin) pass too. This is ideal for a third-party package, because you don't want to rebuild LAM every time your code changes. It also makes LAM classes available if your code is in UnityScript.

The "Editor Default Resources" folder, per that same forum thread, is the preferred location for editor-only resources. We'd love to hide it inside LandscapeAutoMaterial folder, but unfortunately Unity does not recognise it unless it's in root. the purpose of the folder is to store resources available for editor tools, but not included with published builds. Unless you'd like to have our tool icons included with your game, I suggest you leave them in this folder (-8

As for the "Standard Assets", those are required for included demo scene. I'd love to have Unity automatically import standard assets with LAM, but it does not - and removal of those files from LAM would mean shipping with broken demo scene. Maybe we could have renamed the folder from Standard Assets to, I dunno, "LAM Standadr Asssets For Demo". I don't like any of this, actually, but with Unity package management capabilities being what they are, I think we settled for the lesser evil (-8

I know this is probably not what you're used to with store packages, but: we packaged LAM the way we'd love to see all packages made.

 

Can we use other trees and grasses with LAM other than yours? How will this affect the use of your package? I would like to use Speedtrees. I know that i can use uNature to help performance with Speedtrees and grasses but want to make sure I can use other than your packages with LAM.

 

The setup used in the demo and quickstart uses trees and grasses included in the package, but the tool itself can place literally anything on the terrain - including SpeedTree trees, both as prefabs and as terrain engine trees. You'd just have to set them up yourself (or switch prefabs in our setup).

 

Woud it be possible to use terrain shaders alone? I need more script based generation of terrains. So I would like to use different product for splats textures and foliage generation.

Most important things for me is triplanar texturing support with tesselation. It's really unbelievable.
But I still need other features like UV mixing simply same feature set as in RTP.

From manual it looks like it's possible to override splats manually without auto-mixing feature.
Would features like coloring and paint textures uv mixing still working?

And would you still need an auto texture layer?

Haven't you think about possibility to release separate product with terrain shaders only? As they are really breath taking.

Best regards
Peter

 

You may use our terrain shaders without auto layer (just ignore auto and paint everything by hand - or by script. Everything would work, including paintable coloring etc. But that's probably quite wasteful as the shader would still do all the required calculations.

 

First off just wanted to say looking over the Demo scene and playing with stuff this is the start of something much needed for us level designers. So thanks for bringing this over to unity. Looking forward to making amazing scenes much quicker this way.

Looking over the docs I get you want us to use your sample prefab terrain as its already built. What if eventually we don't want any of this and have our own assets to use. We need a tutorial video starting from scratch with a blank terrain and built up from there from beginning to end. As of now I just deleted all the scripts on your prefab terrain and just tried to do it all by by hand one by one and really hard to see what is what and how to get it all going. So please continue updating this amazing system and get us some tutorials. Thanks.

-Miguel

 

I need to second this. I tried setting up a new terrain, because the demo one is quite small and I wanted to see how well it performed on a large one.
I tried copying the components/scripts and their values, and couldn't get it regenerate the plants and trees at the correct elevations. I wasn't even worried about tweaking the rules, I just wanted it to regen the existing ruleset and assets on the new terrain.

So yes Documentation showing how to set up a simple scene (maybe just a few trees and grasses, plants, etc) would be very welcome!

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gemNlqk37_1fhWDp6on8HUp32fE7-bzkrXrXEL878ZU/edit

Manual. This might help.

 

Copying components is not the recommended way in LAM. When you do that, they end up linking to wrong resources - and while we do detect and correct this situation, it's inherently bug-prone. A terrain prefab functionality is much better, and the prefab in the package is not an exact copy of demo scene: it has all the same rules set up, but no heightmap and no painted vegetation - you start almost from scratch.

To try larger terrain, the simplest way is to create a terrain from our prefab and then make it larger (-8

As for setting up LAM terrain completely from scratch - yes, we plan to include a guide in the manual and/or make a video tutorial, but it's a pretty long process. For now, it's easier to first play with tweaking values in the existing setup, before "graduating" to creating your own from scratch.

 

WHOOHOO, it is Live and available on the Unity Asset Store, go GRAB IT HERE

 

Hi,

I saw someone asked about RTS map building, so I grabbed my own Tower Defense RTS Human Towers package and LAM some elves to show what it looks like with them all in and a more Top Down perspective.






Cheers
Cobus