I posted this in Unity support yesterday to no response, and realized that probably wasn’t the correct forum. Hope this is alright.
When I use the detail brush to place meshes on the terrain, they float across the ground. I’m guessing this is due to the way the tool applies some sort of wind script to make it seem realistic. I only want the tips of the bushes to move in the wind - and I know this is done by painting the vertex alpha black and grey to define which parts are affected by the wind.
I don’t have blender though, so I’m trying to do this through Maya. My first idea was to simply fill the alpha vertex color of my mesh with black so that it stops waving in the wind, and then exporting that in an FBX. Unfortunately, when I use this, the in-game mesh is invisible. It’s actually invisible if I apply any color to the vertex alpha whatsoever, white or black. As far as I know, I’m not actually touching the RGB vertex colors of the mesh, only the alpha.
I’m not sure if this is an issue with Maya, the FBX, or Unity. Any ideas would be appreciated.
Well, I’ve tried blender, but still unable to get it working. Despite my best google searching, there doesn’t seem to be a clear way to only paint the vertex alphas. I’m sort of shocked how little information there is on this; if anyone has any information on painting vertex alphas in any program that will work with Unity, I would really appreciate it.
Are other developers not using meshes with the detail brush for their terrains, or are they only using billboarded textures? I’m not sure what you’re referring too ivanzu, I am using meshes currently.
I’ve been digging through “why are my detail meshes sliding along the terrain” problem posts in Answers/the forum and concluded it was a bug with Grass rendering style. It turns out it’s simply a documentation bug, since I don’t see vertex colors mentioned anywhere on the Detail Mesh reference page.
I’ve been trying to solve this problem also, but having mixed luck.
In Max2012, I add a Vertex Paint modifier and paint the Diffuse channel white and the Alpha Channel a gradient - black at bottom, grey at top - looks ok in the modifier
but when I export the fbx, the diffuse seems to be using the gradient as well so my meshes are very dark at the bottom and lighter at the top
the mesh wandering problem is solved, but now the color is too dark
spcbeck, were you able to solve that too? if so, could you list the steps?
trick seems to be have the diffuse channel vertex color showing on export to fbx, not the alpha channel vertex colors- that took a lot of experimenting to figure out
so now I can have Detail Meshes opacity mapped and moving in the wind
off to fix all those bushes stuff in the terrain assets package!
btw- does anyone know of a way to view the alpha channel pixels in Unity? A specialty shader or something?
