From the creator of MegaSplat comes MicroSplat, a modular terrain shading system designed around performance and ease of use. MicroSplat is a replacement shader system for Unity Terrains. The base package is free to download, and can be extended via optional paid modules.
MicroSplat’s Core shader package features:
- Up to 32 textures on one terrain in a single pass
- Significantly faster than any other terrain shader on the asset store when run with a similar feature set
- Full PBR based shader
- Automatic Texture conversion and packing. MicroSplat will generate missing normal, height, smoothness, and ambient occlusion maps from the best available source.
- Convert directly from substances at design time
- Linear or Height based Blending
- Supports full mesh workflows for non-terrain objects with the Mesh Workflow module
Per Texture Controls are available for:
- UV Scale and Offset
- Albedo Tint, Contrast and Brightness
- Metallic value
- Smoothness Strength
- Normal Strength
- AO Strength
- Interpolation Contrast
- Subsurface Scattering
- Fuzzy Shading
- Micro Shadows
- And more with additional modules…
Converting to MicroSplat is incredibly easy. Just add the MicroSplatTerrain component to any number of terrains in the scene, press the conversion button, and MicroSplat will read the textures off the existing terrain and set everything up for you. If you don’t have a full set of PBR based textures available, MicroSplat will generate the missing data for you.
MicroSplat can be expanded with additional modules, each of which adds features to the core package.
Bonus integration module for Vegetation Studio included in the free Core module.
MicroSplat is unbelievably fast, often several times faster than competing shaders with the same feature set turned on, and is optimized for both high end and low end hardware. MicroSplat uses a unique shader generation system which re-writes the shader code based on what features are selected, so all features not in use are compiled out of the code, ensuring that you only pay for what you use. MicroSplat is based on a new shading optimization technique which greatly minimizes the amount of work the shader has to do verses traditional techniques. In many cases, there is so much headroom available that you can turn on complex features like Tessellation, Triplanar, and Distance Resampling and still be much faster than other shaders.
MicroSplat requires support for Texture Arrays, which are not available in OpenGLES 2.0, DirectX9 or WebGL 1.0. Minimum Unity Version 5.6.
A Discord channel is available here.
Modules:
MicroSplat is infinitely expandable via custom modules, each of which adds many new features to the system. Some videos of these in action are listed below:
The Tessellation and Parallax Module for MicroSplat adds support for GPU based tessellation and displacement, as well as Parallax Offset Mapping for tessellated and non-tessellated surfaces. When enabled, a simple set of controls is available to control the tessellation, displacement, and parallax globally, or via per-texture controls.
The Terrain Blending module for MicroSplat makes blending meshes with the terrain incredibly easy. No messing around painting transitions, trying to get various shader parameters to line up, or being forced to use special shaders for your meshes. Simply turn the feature on in your terrain, press a button to generate the needed data, and add a component to any mesh which you want to blend to the terrain.
Each mesh can have its own blend controls, allowing you to tweak the overall effect on a per mesh basis. Any changes to the terrain shader automatically propagate to the meshes, and adjustments to the mesh object position update the blend in real-time.
