Viking Village demo available from the Asset Store

I doubt that matters since the actual shader only uses emission color. The emission multiplier is only used by shader editor code, to manipulate the color thats passed to the shader.

 

Running this on a GTX 980 and i7 5930K, Soooooooo good.
Questions:
Was this created in-house?
How did you optimise it so well?

 

Wow, this is beautiful. It's made me a believer I'd like to know more about how it was built so we can integrate the knowledge into our games, what runs good on desktop/mobile, how you overlaid the puddles etc. Really great work guys.

 

@protopop I believe the puddles and the ground are a texture, take a look at their first hands-on demo with textures:

@3:30
This is the same method engines like CryEngine do their puddles.

 

Thanks Kyle - that was really helpful.

Wow so it was easy to add puddles. I haven't figure out how to add bumped or specular textures to my terrain yet, so i used decals dropped onto it. I used a puddle texture, tinted slightly blue, almost see through in the albedo, then used the invert as the specular map in the texture and wham cool puddles. They look great without reflection but i also tried it with a reflection probe in the image below:



The more I come to grips with the new lighting flow the more powerful and flexible im realizing it is. I hope I can pick up more tips fro the Viking demo. I think i remember seeing a blog post or two about how they built it, im going to track it down

Thanks again for the tip.

 

Looks great, I have played a bit of BrightRidge myself.
Good to see you are working out how to use puddles, they are verry underrated in games, I am an advocate of rain and water in games, not sure why

If you are struggling to find suitable textures, I release free 2K PBS textures for Unity 5 every now and then (usually every few days) which are free to use commercially.

http://kylebriggs.co.uk/portfolio/textures-texture-packs/

Hope they help.

P.S. I think the "How To" you are looking for is the PBS Workflow introduction here:
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/02/18/working-with-physically-based-shading-a-practical-approach/

 

Oh, and to get rid of the blue tint, put a dark grey solid texture in the Occlusion slot.

 

>To Anyone Who Knows<

I have been trying to make my own puddled texture for several hours now, how on earth did you guys make these?
I am using Quixel Suite, as you were when this was created, but I cannot seem to achieve the puddle thing, I have gone through your demo sever times trying to replicate this effect but to no avail.
Is there a specific method to this inside Quixel or is this something that needs to be done manually? whichever it is, could you tell me how to do this, or point me in the right direction, thanks.

 

What exactly is your issue?

 

@Labyrith Studios

lars did some PBS puddle - maybe you will be able to figure for yourself what he did and reuse knowledge? http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/lux-wet-shaders-for-unity-5-beta-22.293596/

 

Unfortunately, I cannot use LUX, it conflicts with a few other things I am using and causes graphical issues.
I am trying to achieve it how Unity Technologies have, with an Alpha layer, but I cannot seem to achieve the same effect, no matter what I do.
In this demo, UT have a separate texture, in the alpha channel of that texture are white areas that tell the PBS shader where the high reflectance areas are (hence puddles) but I cannot seem to get it working when I do it.
This is something that would make our work look so much better, but I just can't get it working.

 

Way to set an example of how to make an asset by just dumping everything into Assets. Nice work!

 

Can you explain in more detail what exactly you can't get to work?
They have 3 maps for that terrain with puddles, an albedo map, a normal map and a spec-gloss map. Albedo map has just the colors of the mud, normal map has irregularities of the mud and is flat in the puddle areas, spec map is a constant color while gloss map is pretty rough for the mud areas and is super smooth for the puddle areas. Seems pretty straightforward. Which of this maps do you have an issue with?

 

It's the Spec-Gloss map I can't get working, As they have stated in a previous blog post, this scene was created almost entirely in the Quixel Suite, which I am using, yet I am unable to generate the "super smooth" puddle areas on the specular map without spreading an undesired effect across the whole texture.

 

It shouldn't be spec map, it should be gloss map.
Also, how exactly are you trying to generate the puddle areas?
I'm not sure unity people actually generated anything. The wet mud material with puddles that they used, could very well be a scanned material that came with all the scanned maps. Or the puddles were hand painted using custom masks.

 

I will be using terminology local to Quixel so not sure if you will understand half of it if you haven't used it.

I start up quixel, and start with the Muddy Dirt material.
I then duplicate that layer and enter the Gloss tab.
From here I change the mask to something that has an even spread of both dark and white colour, with harsh transitions.
I then export these maps and make sure the gloss layer is the alpha channel of the specular map.
In Unity 5 I lay the textures in the same places they are on the demo material.

And the puddles barely show up at all, my Gloss mask looks very similar to theirs and yet mine does not work.

 

And your spec map? Does it look similar to theirs?
If you simply take the wet mud textures from the Viking Village demo and use them in your scene, do you get the expected result?

 

Their texture looks the same in every scene, mine does too, it just doesn't look how I want it to look, I am a 3D artist and texturer so this is quite strange for me.

 

Can you share a screenshot?

 

Think I may have fixed this, it's Photoshop, everytime I go to export it wipes the Specular map, but leaves the Gloss unchanged so the gloss barely has any effect.
After fixing this though, mine still looks no-where as good as theirs, instead of having harsh transitions, they have almost a bevel or gradient effect protruding from the white areas into the darker, which seems to be giving it a unique depth effect, something I cannot find in Quixel.

 

I was under the impression that Megascans was not yet available?

 

I believe Megascans was available, at least partially, to a select number of artists and developers.

 

Thanks for these links. I'm impressed with your textures and that you put them put for free like that. It's a great resource for developers and an altruistic thing to do.

You'll be happy to know i am going puddle crazy thanks to the lessons learned from the Viking demo:



I am like you a HUGE fan of water in games too - i totally get it. In fact having rivers and waterfalls is THE major draw for me in virtual terrains. I think there is something realistic and immersive about water. For so long all we had were corridor games like Doom (a classic) and tings like water were out of reach. Now there's all kinds of ways to achieve it so i think it's really special when you come across good water in any form in a game.

 

Great to hear you liked the links and the textures, it is an honor for my textures to be used in a commercial game.
If you don't mind me asking, how did you create your puddle masks, or are you using the default Unity 5 one?
I have worked out how to make them, but they do not look very realistic and do not have the kind of depth the one in the U5 Viking Demo have, puddle maps are something else I would like to release for free once I work it out.

 

I just used the ones in the Viking Demo, but i am working to create my own custom ones. Maybe someone from the Viking Demo could tell us if we're allowed to use the viking assets in our own projects?

 

It appears that those in the demo were not created by Unity Technologies, but are apparently just presets supplied by Quixel from the Megascans pack, which isn't available yet.

 

Oh good to know - thanks

I put together a quick custom puddle texture in Fireworks with some notes. With a little more time it could be finessed even more, but the basic approach seems pretty straightforward:



If the texture doesnt have any transparency then the highlight in the puddle is round so i think the PBS specular channel reads alpha from the image.

The background of the texture is transparent, i just used white for visualization.

Quixel sounds really cool - i hope they make a mac version

 

and here's the texture settings in case it helps

 

Luckily, Quixel Suite is actually a Photoshop plugin, supports CS4+ I think, or 5+, but all you need is a license for Photoshop, I have CC, Photoshop, since Adobe switched to subscription basis, has become a lot more affordable, annoying I will never own it, but I can afford it monthly and that is the main thing.

Anyway, yes Quixel is a Photoshop plugin and should work on Mac versions of Photoshop.

For this water texture, is that a plane above the terrain? and is the Albedo transparent? I am assuming the Specular alpha isn't.

 

The plane in the image is a decal draped over a terrain. I checked the Viking demo and they also use a mesh, not a terrain (i was wondering how they got the specular maps on terrain so mystery solved - but if theres a way id like to know it, maybe one of the ATS plugins or something)

The albedo is like 90% transparent - its just so you can see a bit of the water when you are not looking directly along the axis of teh reflection

The specular map is transperent wherethe white is, and the actual 'splotch/splat' shape is also about 90% transparent otherwise you dont get the variations in the highlight.

also i added a reflection probe - when it is off you can see the puddle mostly only when you are looking along it reflection axis, but with the probe they become much more visible. I also decreased the intensity of teh probe reflection to less than 50% otherwise you get really overpowering puddles.

Col, about Quixel.I use Substance designer but i will give it a try - i have Adobe subscription too - its actually a great deal for business, like 60 odd dollars a month and you get almost everything

The Viking Demo is a real eye opening resource - im glad they released it and the tutorials.

 

Very interesting, thanks a lot for the tip, in the next week or so I may release a pack of transparent puddle textures.
When you say the mesh is modelled "over" the terrain, how on earth did you get the decal mesh to fit the terrain that well? I have seen many people attempt to model over the top of their terrain but that works incredibly well, how did you achieve it if you don't mind be asking?

 

On nVidia cards this is beautiful. When I test on Intel HD cards (I know, a piece of junk these days - but many play on macbooks running this, and I work on a machine having this card) it looks horrible. On Unity 4 it seems cheaper/integrated cards tended to work better. Are the PBR shaders and even GI generally to be used only with non-integrated cards?

And in my tests - with both indoor and outdoor scenes, - it seems baked lightmaps tend to come with many artifacts and work poorly on Intel HD cards (a couple of the bugs reported in Unity's bug system seem to confirm my experience).

http://imgur.com/JOZIHh3

Thanks.

Edit:This screenshot seems to be from the version with the broken terrain texture. I am getting similar look/messed up lightmaps and GI also with the more recent version. I will try to post a screenshot shortly.

 

I used Decal System pro - it is awesome! really flexible.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/10608

 

Sadly also still getting the pink ground problem with the newest version from the asset store and RC3. Problem happens with both a single 970gtx as well as 2x970gtx SLI if that's any help.