TerraFormer is an advanced modular terrain shader with high-end features targeting desktops & consoles to bring realistic visuals in Unity. It’s fully PBR and brings colors & life to your terrains
TerraFormer comes with 2 types of Standard & Tessellated (HDRP Only) versions each supporting up to 8 terrain layers in 1 pass exclusively developed for HDRP & URP.
The package also comes with 2 demo scenes of “Island” & “Mountains” to see the end result and a test-bed for changing terrain material parameters in real-time while targeting fully PBR rendering and high-end graphics.
Features:
Draw Instanced option
Layers’ Color Tint
Layers’ AO (Ambient Occlusion)
Heightmap Blending
Tessellation (HDRP Only)
Procedural Snow
Procedural Puddles
Colormap Blending
Procedural Texturing (GPU Splatmapping)
Tiling Remover
Terrain Holes
Fully PBR via Smoothness/Metallic/Heightmap/AO data taken directly from terrain layers
Supports terrain system’s “Draw Instanced” feature to bring smooth and very high performance experience
See it in action
Following screenshots are coming from “Mountains” & “Island” demo scenes that come with the package.
A kindly message to the TERRA community: These shaders were in development for a full 2 years of work for a team of 3 including GPU programmers and technical artists and we hope you enjoy getting creative with colors & shapes created with TerraFormer.
Enjoy getting creative with TerraFormer in your beautiful scenes
A lot of people asked: How to create terrain layers from Quixel Megascans, or from any other PBR textures/materials?
Here you go:
First of all, a terrain layer is a built-in Unity asset which is used on terrain as materials for texture painting and blend on terrain surface. To create a terrain layer file in Unity follow these links:
Regarding the Mask Map slot in terrain layer which is the key part in PBR workflow rendering, read the following:
If you look at the above picture, you will see that each channel in the mask holds specific data as follows:
R = Metallic
G = Ambient Occlusion
B = Height
A = Smoothness
Look for TerraFormer’s included terrain layers in the Island/Mountain demo scenes where all have Mask Maps in their terrain layers so that TerraFormer can use these map types and data for high-end rendering features of terrain surface.
For example, when you use the Tessellation version of the shader on your terrain material, if terrain layer has heightmap data in its B channel of Mask Map in terrain layer, it will displace the terrain surface based on that data and adds another dimension to your terrain visuals with more depth in shape and real-world PBR lighting/shadows.
So you can use any PBR materials on terrain including MegaScans materials/textures or if found online and feed them into Mask Maps’ channels so that you can make a mask out of them to use in TerraWorld layers.
Note: Unity’s built-in terrain rendering does not take Mask Map into account for rendering and it only uses Diffuse and Normal Map textures for legacy rendering but if you use TerraFormer on your terrain, then it will handle a full PBR workflow using Mask Map’s data.
Here you can see TerraFormer features which are mostly dependent on terrain layers’ maskmap:
That’s not the standard on the UAS and as you’re selling via the Asset Store you’re running the risk of causing us devs a world of hurt. I’m really interested in purchasing, and it looks worth it even at full price, but it’s a hard pass until I know that I won’t be sued by incorporating your work.
Thanks for bringing this up here, I’ve talked with Andrew about this case and we will update the package by today with no copyrighted content in place so that you can use everything in the package in your games and projects. Hopefully there was only a few minor files which were licensed and they all will be removed.
We will also port the scenes outside the original package so you can access them from our servers directly for a more modular file management and more frequent updates to demo scenes.
Since Unity is still experimental with Shader Graph and DX12, please make sure that your project is set to DX11 for the best compatibility and avoid these conflicts until Unity comes with a stable release with DX12.
It comes with “TerraFormer Manager” component that can be loaded from menus to handle all terrains, materials and terrain layers from one place to include/exclude certain tiles, set materials and assign terrain layers easily.
Another major improvement is that no matter how many terrains you have in your scene, they will only use one TerraFormer material for the best performance and consistency between settings and TerraFormer automatically sets terrain layers and splatmaps internally. You can still have multiple TerraFormer materials for your terrains in scene if needed and duplicated materials can have their “Global” option in settings set to off to make sure those specific settings only work for that material.
We have added Forward Rendering support for HDRP pipeline and made it compatible with SRP batcher.
Hello, very interesting asset, does the terraformer work with only unity terrain, or it also works with procedurally generated mesh like map magic or other similar assets?
I pick it up this morning, only had a bit of time to play around with it… ( IN HDRP ) it looks great!!!
It was so far pretty easy to figure out… I used Gaia, But have [TerraLand 3 - Real-World 3D Terrain Tool](http://TerraLand 3 - Real-World 3D Terrain Tool) As well and
will be using it a far amount too!!! Once I have time I will leave some reviews for the better Devs in Unity …
I have one quick suggestion, I believe GTS does this automatically … Will it be possible for TerraFormer to more or less " auto get " the terrain layers from the terrain, instead of having to assign them by hand ?
So far from the very small time I have had with it… it is great!!! no regrets
This TerraFormer version is made specifically for terrains since it links to terrains’ data to setup splatmapping and terrain layers based on whatever painted on terrain and some other terrain related stuff such as Instanced Drawing on terrains.
But we are working on a Procedural version of TerraFormer which does not need any terrain data (e.g. splatmaps) and works fully on GPU to automatically paint texture layers based on various conditions (e.g. height, slope, flowmaps, cavity…) on top of the mesh surfaces no matter how these mesh-type terrain surfaces are created. Please stay tuned for latest announcements and TerraFormer line releases.
Thanks for the good vibes and energy, we are so lad you liked it so far
TerraFormer already gets terrain layers automatically when assigned to a terrain and no extra steps are needed at all. I suppose you are referring to the “TerraFormer Manager” component which is an optional component in scene when you are dealing with multi terrains in scene where you can have an arbitrary list of terrain layers which can be assigned on all terrains in scene automatically if you haven’t set them for your terrains in scene.
So if you already setup your terrain layers and painted them on your terrain, then it’s only a drag & drop of material on your terrains.
I will look around more… I assume it gets the terrain layers from Terraland 3 The button has pick terraland OR an other terrain not made by Terraland … then it does not seem to work … I probably then am doing something wrong .
Oh ok, TerraLand 3 does not generate or assign any terrain layers (grass, rock, stone, pebbles…) on terrains and only paints satellite images as base textures, so there are no terrain layers painted on terrain at first place to pass it to TerraFormer.
So you either have to assign and paint terrain layers on TL3 generated terrains or use another asset like TerraWorld which also generates splatmaps and assign terrain layers automatically so you only need to insert TerraFormer material on your terrains.
Here is a screen shot of all the assets so far… ( templates still to go ) … I can say this for sure… Of ALL the terrain shaders I have, THIS is simply the easiest ( and Best ) I have ever used… in Unity … and I know I the default setting are just that and WOW on that even
Wow, this is amazing Mark, huge thanks for the purchases and nice complements, you have no idea how appreciated your words and feedback are here which gives us so much energy to continue. I hope they will get better with every update and become useful in your projects.
Please share with us your creations with TerraFormer or other TERRA assets at your convenience
Also send me a PM here for the TerraWorld Templates voucher
