Help with refining a tilemap - Do I need shaders or what?

Unity Engine
1

Hi,

I have a large tile map that can be 100’s x 100’s in size. I’ve made it by creating a mesh of many tiles (triangle x2) and then mapped the UV’s from a texture onto each square.

This works fine and looks like this https://puu.sh/sawhP/8920857d7f.png

The tile images are based on the height component from a fractal map. This all works fine.

What I would like to do now is to refine the tiles so that the boundaries between different levels are are rounded and it appears more organic. Now I could go and create hundreds of tiles and pick the correct one with a bitmask etc but as there are eight colours that would need a crazy number of combinations.

So am after suggestions from anyone who has tackled this thing before. I have never written a shader but that may be the way to go? I’m not sure.

I’m currently thinking layering two tiles on top of each other with the bottom tile having a solid colour and the top tile having the shape of the edge with transparent ‘non edge’ parts so the background will come through. If this top tile was white I could then colour it on the fly perhaps?

Can anyone tell me the ‘correct’ way I should be heading for this?

Many Thanks.

2

You can solve this with Standard Shader, but you will have to change surface normals. All of your normals probably point to the same direction - UP. All you have to do is slowly interpolate surface normals according to heightmap changes.