![1716853--157161--Horizon[ON].jpg](https://europe1.discourse-cdn.com/unity/original/3X/d/e/de3be9e87d526124db7536c9852441bbe400dcd3.jpeg)
Links: Demo PC | Demo Mac | Manual | Asset Store
Horizon[ON] is available on the Asset Store for $45,-
Features
Main
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extend your terrain towards the horizon at a minimum cost
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insane view distances at minimal cost
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smooth blending
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works for terrains of any size(with unity terrains or mesh terrains)
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extremely adjustable & artist friendly workflow
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very low on draw calls
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mobile friendly
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works with Unity 4.6 free version
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ready for Unity 5
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now with prefab painter with auto combine function (thousands of objects in on mesh)
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3 trees types included (+ 8 Variations for each)
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20 buildings included
Shaders/Materials
- multi_compile shaders - use only the features you really need
- clever material management
- tidy custom material inspector
- PBR, but still adjustable to your needs
- works with OpenGL, DX9, DX11,
- works in Linear and Gamma Space
- IBL Ambient Lighting & Specularity
- ambient override and tint to easily match your scenery
- 4 Layers for different terrain types on one horizon
- detail textures and normal maps
- emissive channels for distant city lights, volcanos or else…
- water & ice (oceans, rivers, lakes…)
- height based fog
- vertical cliffs
- displacement
- tesselation(DX11 only)
- dynamic snow
Blendobjects
- easily add hills and cliffs to the horizon with a minimum of polygons
- add tesselated parts to the horizon for great detail
- all perfectly blended with the horizon object
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Does Horizon[ON] work with Unity 5’s Lighting?
A: Yes, sure, if you mean U5’s spherical harmonic ambient lighting, yes.
Q: Does Horizon work with Enlighten?
A: No, it does not need to. Terrains and generally outdoor scenes, are pretty much ideal situations for dynamic IBL(Image Based Lighting - Light coming from a skybox). Lightmapping or precalculated lighting on an object of thousands of square km size would not be a good idea anyway. You can however, use Enlighten on your closeup terrain(s) and geometry and still use Horizon[ON].
Q: How well does Horizon work with “Time of Day“ or other sky assets.
A: Very well, Horizon[ON] has been extensively tested with TOD and it is a perfect combination. Not only produces TOD very good looking skys, it also gives great dynamic lighting on Horizon[ON]. Also it comes with an ImageFX for atmospheric scattering(basically a more realistic fog). I can recommend TOD wholeheartedly.
Q: How does the blending(transition) from my terrain to Horizon[ON] work.
A: There are a few ways to do it. The regular way would be to flatten the terrain on the outside edges and overlay the transition object from Horizon[ON] onto your terrain. In my opinion this is the best option as it is easy to do and gives great visual results. Usually you can not let the player get too close to the edge of the terrain without revealing limited range and the square shape of your environment. With Horizon[ON] you can allow the player to get very close to the edge ad still hold the illusion of an infinite world. There are also other way to do it. In my tests it was perfectly feasible to just place the terrain a bit above Horizon[ON] and do no transition at all. The edge of the terrain will just look like a hill in fron of the horizon. This way the player can still come fairly close to the edge, especially if the player can not take very elevated positons, but even if so it can still work fine. Another method would be just a intersection between your terrain and the geometry of Horizon[ON]. if you match the colors of Horizon[ON] well enough with the colors of your terrain this can work quite well too, especially if you put additional detail like rocks, trees, buildings, roads, etc. over the parts where the intersection occurs. Lastly there is also the possibility to create your own transition mesh and use that but this option is the most tricky one and is usually not needed. Which of the described methods works best in your case, you have to find out on your own as i can not generalize all kind of terrains and the usecases.
Q: Can objects like trees and buildings be placed on Horizon[ON].
A: Sure and i recommend to decorate Horizon[ON] further, especially in proximity of the walkable terrain. Horizon[ON] comes with a building and tree placer script, also there are some trees and buildings included that are very efficient to render(many times more efficient that SpeedTree trees for example). You can also place any other objects on Horizon[ON].
Q: How can i match Horizon[ON]’s built in Fog and Snow with my objects,
A: I included a building and a tree shader made with shader forge. You could either use these directly or you can duplicate them and make your own shaders out of it. The included shaders have a node setup that uses the same properties as the Horizon[ON] shaders, that means you can control these shaders and Horizon[ON]’s shaders at the same time and get the same results(Fog Density, Snow Amount, etc.). E.g. When you increase the snow amount it would be done so for all objects on Horizon[ON]. Also there is an asset called “UBER Standard Shader Ultra”, i recommend looking into it, It is in my opinion the best and most complete shader solution for Unity. It also allows you to control things like snow with very little effort and very convincing results. With very little scripting you could sync Horizon[ON]’s snow with the snow from UBER.
Q: Does Horizon[ON] use a lot of textures and therefor much memory?
A: No, not neccesarily. While you can crank up the resolution of your textures to the maximum for astonishing results, it is by no means neccesary to do so for a AAA look. Horizon[ON] does utilize tiling textures and detail textures to make the impression of huge textures with much higher resolution than are actually used. You could easily have a very good looking horizon with detail objects and a terrain in the middle and your scene would still fit into a 10mb Webplayer.
Q: Can Horizon[ON] be used in only one direction or does it have to be all around?
A: No, it does not have to surround your terrain. If your player will never look behind a hill for example, i recommend to remove all the geometry behind it. What can never be seen should not exist in your scene.
Q: Is it possible to use Horizon with a mesh based terrain instead of a Unity terrain?
A: Absolutely, the terrain in the example scene is such a case… what you put in the center of Horizon[ON] is up to you.
Q: Can i use Horizon[ON] with a multi-terrain setup?
A: Yes you can, just use it as it would be a single terrain and put Horizon[On] around that.
Q: How does the making of a new horizon work, do i paint the heightmap just like with Unity’s terrain?
A: No, it is different. Horizon[ON] supports up to 4 layers + water, each of these layers can be described as a whole terrain type(meaning that it has its own heightmap, colormap, normal map, etc.). These layers are then blended together using a 4 channel mask image, which you can draw in photoshop or Gimp.
Q: Ok, so how do i make a new layer then?
A: That depends on your favourite workflow and what you expect from the final look. Possible tools to use are: Worldmachine, TerrainComposer, WorldComposer, ZBrush, MudBox, Photoshop/Gimp… What you need to end up with, is a topological image of a terrain type(e.g. desert) for your new layer. You dont need to make a heightmap if you dont use displacement and you dont need to make a normal map if you never going to enable normal mapping. However if you do use the full feature set of Horizon[ON], you get the best results by making a heightmap and normal map that fits your colormap. If you have your layer finished you should make it tileable so you can get a much higher texel resolution. I personally would recommend to either use world machine to generate the needed maps or to use a satelite data grabbing tool like “WorldComposer“. With the satelite data you get a Colormap and a fitting heightmap. This heightmap can be used to generate a normal map from(eg. using CrazyBump, xNormal, etc… you can also generate a normal map in WorldMachine or Terrain Composer from a heightmap).
Q: How many polygons does Horizon[ON] use?
A: That depends heavily on your case, you can have it ranging from less than 50 triangles, to millions of triangles. There are many ways to reduce the polycount drastically in a lot of cases you can reduce the triangle count by a factor of 10 or more in the optimizing stage… baking the displacement(given that you use displacement), exporting the meshes, combining them to one and letting a polygon optimizer run over it, is a good idea, especially if you want to squeeze the most performance out of Horizon[ON]. Though horizon is still very fast with a few polys more… Also take note that shadows can impact your stats dramatically.
Tutorial Videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhqhHDYJuyQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcdPw6raeeE
Download The Horizon[ON] Game (windows only, made with Version 1.0)
Leaderboard of the May 2015 Competition
Leaderboard:
1st Place - spryx - Score: 15.072.400 (Prizes won: Horizon[ON], SnazzyGrid2, SnazzyPaint)
2nd Place - TonanBora - Score: 9.086.000 (Prizes won: SnazzyGrid2, SnazzyPaint)
3nd Place(shared) - svaldenegro - Score: 3.654.900 (Prizes won: SnazzyGrid2)
3nd Place(shared) - Makingames - Score: 2.377.300 (Prizes won: SnazzyGrid2)
3nd Place(shared) - Dante20011 - Score: 2.127.900 (Prizes won: SnazzyGrid2)
Leaderboard of the April 2015 Competition
Leaderboard:
1st Place - Zeblote - Score: 18.404.100 (Prizes won: Horizon[ON], SnazzyGrid2, SnazzyPaint)
2nd Place - Xenonus - Score: 17.655.100 (Prizes won: SnazzyGrid2, SnazzyPaint)
3nd Place - cg_destro - Score: 3.270.200 (Prizes won: SnazzyPaint)
Leaderboard of the March 2015 Competition
Leaderboard:
1st Place - jmjd - Score: 15288100 (Prizes won: Horizon[ON], SnazzyGrid2, SnazzyPaint)
2nd Place - ZedalisDesign - Score: 14823700 (Prizes won: Horizon[ON], SnazzyGrid2, SnazzyPaint)
3nd Place - Gekigengar - Score: 1830300 (Prizes won: SnazzyPaint)
The Horizon[ON] Game competition is closed! You can still play it(link above), it does not show the full quality of Horizon[ON] as it was not made with the latest version but it can still give you an idea how Horizon[ON] can look in the context of a simple game, and its fun.
Please still pariticipate on the poll, i am always interested what are you going to use Horizon[ON] for.
Regards,
Peter
Thanks! it does work for anything square(or rectangular)… it works best if the terrain(or mesh) is flattened on the outside edge as this gives the best blending from terrain to horizon but that is optional.
