Layered Lit, where is your Height Blend Contrast?

[bitinn]

Hi Unity Team,

Here is something I never managed to understand, why isn’t Layered Lit height blend a normal height blend?

As far as I know, this is a normal height blend (Material Height Blend node in Substance Designer), where you can control the contrast of blending in cases only sharp transition make sense (Grass → Mud).

But what we are seeing with Layered Lit, with a lot of adjustment between Height Transition & Height Map Parametrization, we never managed to get this sharp transition. At least not while preserving decent blending with vertex color (small Height Transition value make the vertex color very apparent):

Our observation is, with Main Layer influence, we are able to blend similar texture quite well, but the unrealistic opacity fade is what breaks it.

And yes, I had read the Fontainebleau Photogrammetry PDF you guys linked, it doesn’t contain a good example for this problem.

Is there an existing workaround?

Thx

[Win3xploder]

You might need to adjust the contrast of the height maps to fix this.

[bitinn]

@Win3xploder

You might need to adjust the contrast of the height maps to fix this.

We did, so far it didn’t turn out like what we wanted, we basically have the same problem as this thread:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/728881

Our setup is something like:

• Height transition < 0.1

• Height Map Parametrization we use about 100cm range, and put height on different offset.

Which sort of get to the Substance Designer result I shown, but not quite as good as this:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/B8926

I feel like a traditional height blend setup would at least be easier, the way Layered Lit works feel more convoluted.

http://untitledgam.es/2017/01/height-blending-shader/

[bitinn]

So an update:

I discover that the most important part of the height blend in Layered Lit is not Height texture, but the Alpha channel of BaseColor, the doc called it “Density map”.

It’s not well explained in the doc, but density map is critical in being able to transition between textures naturally, instead of an unrealistic opacity fade when Height Transition is 1.

I would love to have more control in shader about it, but trial-and-error is the best way to find a good density map setup for your textures.