The Shader replaces the built “first pass” terrain shader and gives you the possibility to use a colormap and different normal maps along with the standard detail maps in order to give your terrains a more lively look.
the shader supports
1 colormap which is used as basemap on far viewing distances and as underlay on close distances
1 terrain normal map covering the whole terrain
1 custom made and imported splat map controlling the the splatting of the detail maps
4 detail maps which are mixed in at shorter distances
I would suggest you Wenda tutorial from polycount.com forums or wenda111 from youtube. You got all covered there in hours of tutorials. It is primary for Cryengine but it works 100% for Unity too.
Ok i got my test terrain sitting and waiting, now waiting for Asset store to approve this shader.
Open it in Mozilla, Chrome has problems with Unitys webplayer.
He is giving it for free.
I can confirm that shader works like charm, true next gen terrain look can be achieved with it, but the main point of this shader is to use external app like WorldMachine 2 or Mudbox to create terrain, otherwise you cant grab full potential of normals and color map.
it is not: on the far away parts of the terrain it is bumped diffuse, on the closer parts its mixes together 1 base colormap, 4 diffuse detail textures (color corrected on the fly to fit the color map), 4 normal detail textures and 1 normal texture covering the whole terrain.
you will have to get close to the terrain to notice the detail textures.
but i have to admit: this has been the first time working with world machine and i guess some more experienced user than me would get much better color maps out of this app. another thing that keeps the demo far behind from what i guess could be achieved is the fact that i used the free edition of world machine which limits the texture resolution to 513x513px.
but to make sure that the shader really works for you (and you do not just see the fallback shader) i would like you to paste a screenshot from the webplayer. or compare it to the second screenshoot of this post: it should look like shown on the right side of the image.
well, it seems to turn out that the original version of the shader does not work correctly under windows.
so here comes a link to a modified version of the shader:
This is very nice… I almost moved away from terrains in Unity, because of the issues with sculpting detailed terrain… I am also more interested in the workflow to get these detailed maps in there (I am a VUE user) from ZBrush… for example, I want to model a complete cliff face and be able to use it in Unity
well – cliffs still are very difficult to model just using a heightfield due to the fact that the textures will be streched extremely at slopes with an angle > 60 degrees. the only way to texture them correctely is to use a triplanar shader on the terrain which is pretty expensive to render…
but you will find one on the forum e.g. one made be farafar. but i think it does not work on mac.
if you model your cliff in zbrush just import it as regular game object and place it on you terrain. that is the way everyone does.
janpec posted a “link” to some tutorials, just have a look at them:
You could easily use Zbrush or Mudbox to make whole terrain and even make detail maps each of them tiled. Cliffs are different story, you cant or rather should not make cliffs with heightmap terrain, the only solution that could be used is voxel terrain, but in either case modeling cliffs by hand in 3d modeling app or Zbrush gives much better results than voxels or heightmap terrain.
True… I don;t plan on using Unity Terrain because of the shader quality… the only issue I will have is trying to use grass and setting foliage… I will be creating my terrain using VUE and Zbrush… (Still trying to figure out how to get splatmaps out of VUE
