InTerra ~ Terrain Features

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InTerra ~ Terrain Features

~ Integration of Objects into Terrain (Advanced Terrain Blending) ~
~ Hiding texture repetition ~
~ Parallax occlusion mapping ~
~ Heightmap blending ~
~ Triplanar mapping ~
~ Automatic steep slopes texturing ~
~ Tessellation (HDRP Only)~

8 Likes
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I would like one voucher! Thank you!

this asset looks amazing with powerful features!

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Thanks :slight_smile: … you should have the voucher code in Inbox! :slight_smile:

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I would also like one voucher, please :slight_smile:

Looks cool! Is SRP support planned for the future or is this going to be solely Built-in only?

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You should have voucher code in Inbox :wink:

Well, I already started working on URP :slight_smile: …but have to work in 2021.2 alpha… it is because without the Custom Interpolators in Shader Graph some functions cannot work properly and it is not available in current version… so I’m planning to add URP shaders after 2021.2 release and it sadly will not work in any previous version…

HDRP version would be nice too, but for now… I’m still not sure about it… :slight_smile:

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I just bought this asset, and it’s exactly what I wanted it for, which is having the Standard Unity terrain shader (and all of it’s capabilities like the basemap functionality) but with some things like Triplanar mapping. All the extra features are just a bonus.

So far it’s been great for that. I did notice, however that it appears that neither the Specular color nor the smoothness value from the texture terrain layer change the rendered results.

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Another thing. I’m not sure how the base-map is calculated, but it appears that InTerra is using only the textures before the “Hide Tiling” is applied. I would imagine in most cases it the basemap would look better if it took HideTiling into account…in some cases, it can look pretty bad if you have tiling set pretty low (so it looks good up close), and then relying on Hide Tiling to remove tiling from a distance. Here is a video showcasing what I’m referring to.

Thanks!

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I see, I guess I should have paid more attention to basemap - but that should not be the problem for me to fix and I will do the update within few days. Thanks for mention it !

EDIT:
The Terrain Base Map was improved in version 1.2.0 :slight_smile:

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The Specular color is not used in standard shader - so I did not use that either, but I definitely have to check the smoothness values… it probably would be because I added the possibility of remapping the smoothness values in mask map channel remapping - and alpha channel values are affecting the smoothness even if it is taken from the alpha channel of Albedo… I should have stated it in the documentation more clearly - sorry about that.

…it also may be confusing because of this https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/terrain-smoothness-does-not-work-on-some-terrain-layers

EDIT:
It was changed in 1.1.1 update - the mask remapping now affects the smoothness value only if it is taken from the Mask map to avoid confusion.

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Sweet, thanks!

You are right. InTerra is working exacly like Unity’s Shader in this case. We had one particular texture with a really strange alpha channel, and after removing it, it looked fine, and then I could use the smoothness slider in InTerra to adjust. The reason I wasn’t seeing it before is we were using Unity’s legacy diffuse shader, which didn’t use the alpha channel. Thanks!

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It would be awesome to have a way to enable tri-planar for only specific textures. It is quite heavy on mobile devices, and in our case, we only really need it on very steep surfaces, which are always dominated by a single rock texture.

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You are right, and I was thinking about that feature a while ago too… and it would solve one thing - I just realized, as I’m working on that base map - that to add the Hide Tiling as you suggested is no problem(and it is basically finished) - but Triplanar is, because if you do the front/side projection, and you have some tall mountain (like in your video), it will project the base map on the steep slopes as you see it from top-down with all that surrounding grass and there is not much what to do with it (maybe just some heavy solution with 3D texture)… but if the triplanar for the base map would be allowed only for one texture, there would not be this problem…

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I decided to add that feature - Triplanar for one layer only - and I will update the package after that - so I hope you don’t mind to wait for the base map improvement a little longer, I hope in two weeks it could be done…
Also, if you are not using normal maps nor the mask maps as I saw in video, then the shader could be compiled as pragma target 2.0 and it could be better for mobile… if you wanted to experiment with it, I can show you how, it is super easy…

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Thanks for all of your help!

That’s awesome, and yeah we can wait a couple weeks :slight_smile:

That would be great info to have! Even with all the features of InTerra turned off, I was seeing about a %40 increase in GPU usage on a Quest 1 vs the Standard Shader. At any rate, any optimization tips would be helpful :slight_smile:

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I’m not 100% sure I’m understanding what you’re saying, but in my opinion, tri-planar probably doesn’t impact the base-map visuals nearly as much as the Hide Tiling feature does. Tri-planar mostly impacts the look of the terrain up close, and probably wouldn’t be all that noticeable from far away, where the basemap is visible (unlike HideTiling whose main purpose is to impact visuals from far away).

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That’s unusual, I would swear that with all features off it is exactly like Standard… the only thing that could cause it is that Unity is seting on the keyword _NORMALMAP even if there are no normal maps - it happened to me too and I was thinking it might be better to let the user to set it manually - just some toggle field “Disable Normal map” …

But you can simply test it - if you open the file - InTerra/Data/Shader/InTerra_Standard-FirstPass

  • then on line 30 is #pragma multi_compile_local __ _NORMALMAP and you can put it into comment…

Then you can also do it with line 29 (if you don’t use the terrain holes), 35 and 38… and then you can change the #pragma target 3.0 to 2.0 … I hope it will help :slight_smile:

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Well, without triplanar the base map on steep slopes would look similary as if you turn of triplanar and watching those mountain from distance…so it would be stretched… and I thought that it would be nice if the transition would be as unnoticable as posible… :slight_smile: …but it would be slightly heavier…so I will see…

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Sounds good! As an aside…is the basemap texture one “large” texture which covers the entire terrain and generated before the terrain loads? Or, do chunks need to be dynamically generated as you move across a terrain?

I did a more precise test, and you are correct. It is undetectable from the (new) Standard Shader. I was comparing it to the old diffuse terrain shader from way back, which does appear to be faster, but you can’t really do anything about that I’d imagine. Sorry for the confusion.

I did all that, but I couldn’t get shader model 2.0 working due to too many interpolators. I don’t believe simply switching to SM3 to SM2 would help performance, though, correct? If that’s the case, then using SM2 isn’t something we’d personally need.

Also, I do not believe I was having the issue where the _NORMALMAP keyword was being defined…assuming it would show up on the material.

Thanks again for your replies and for looking into the other suggestions I’ve asked about :slight_smile:

TLDR: It does appear that InTerra performance is the same as the Standard Terrain Shader when all features are disabled.

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It is the first case - one texture of the size setted in Terrain settings…

I just remembered someone was complaining about framerate drop on mobile just by switching from SM2 to SM3 (but it was probably some older discussion)… and I was curious if it will compile as 2.0 - so I tried it as I suggested and it worked - so I thought it could be interesting for you to test it too… but now I realised I tested the 2.0 compilation on the working version where I did some slight change and removed one interpolator - sorry about that… :slight_smile:

You are welcomed! … I do not have much feedback yet so I’m glad for any :slight_smile:

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Another suggestion would be to include a version of the shader which is based off of the Nature->Terrain->Diffuse shader for super low-end devices, if possible :slight_smile: