My Terrain looks like it's under a sheet of freezing rain.

[rickblacker]

I posted this question on another site, not as much traffic so I’m going to post it here as well… I’m using a texture over my terrain… When I run the level, everything looks like it’s under a sheet of freezing rain. Not what I want. It’s just a forrest texture.

I was told that the the Alpha channel of the diffuse texture is the one that controls the smoothness factor used by the shader.

Being rather new to Unity and all this, I’m not entirely sure how to correct this. I found the texture in package, I’ve looked at it’s properties in the inspector, but not seeing how I can play with alpha settings.

Was hoping that someone might be able to give me a heads up on how to modify this texture so that it does not make my terrain look like it’s under freezing rain.

Thanks

[jvo3dc]

Screenshots? View of the texture and its alpha?

[Talavaj]

You need a bitmap editing program and a texture which can hold alpha channels. (such as tga)
Then look up a tutorial on how to edit the alpha channel in your particular program, because the process may vary.

Normally, you would just import the roughness maps separately and not fiddle with any alpha channels.
Unfortunately Unity Technologies have a real fetish for making everything as complicated, user hostile and pointless as possible.

[rickblacker]

Thanks, I was able to figure it out in the “World-Creator” plugin settings. Having said that, if I ever run into this situation where I’m not using World-Creator, I’ll know where to start looking.

[Chanhy]

@Talavaj

You need a bitmap editing program and a texture which can hold alpha channels. (such as tga)
Then look up a tutorial on how to edit the alpha channel in your particular program, because the process may vary.

Normally, you would just import the roughness maps separately and not fiddle with any alpha channels.
Unfortunately Unity Technologies have a real fetish for making everything as complicated, user hostile and pointless as possible.

It is for optimal performance, since terrains already use lots of textures.

[Talavaj]

@Chanhy

It is for optimal performance, since terrains already use lots of textures.

That’s not an excuse.
It should be optional where the inputs are taken from.

Other engines get away with giving you full control over this as well as the ability to use grayscale images as a replacement for the A channel - which unity doesn’t even recognize as valid files.
Not to mention they give you robust adjustment options so you can adjust textures like these on the fly. (contrast, brightness etc)
Unity gives you one useless slider (and in case of terrain… they don’t even bother to do that) and about 20 pointless extra steps which just bog down the workflow with trivial and time consuming nonsense.

[Chanhy]

@Talavaj

That’s not an excuse.
It should be optional where the inputs are taken from.

Other engines get away with giving you full control over this as well as the ability to use grayscale images as a replacement for the A channel - which unity doesn’t even recognize as valid files.
Not to mention they give you robust adjustment options so you can adjust textures like these on the fly. (contrast, brightness etc)
Unity gives you one useless slider (and in case of terrain… they don’t even bother to do that) and about 20 pointless extra steps which just bog down the workflow with trivial and time consuming nonsense.

You are right about that. It wouldn’t be hard to include a tool to combine grayscale textures into a packed RGB or RGBA.
Anyway, the whole terrain system ,as it is right now, a complete mess.

[jvo3dc]

You can use the alpha (A8) only format for a grayscale image. That’s how I do it now. I would also prefer to just have a 8 bit grayscale (L8) format as an option. And the grayscale with alpha format (L8A8).

@Chanhy

You are right about that. It wouldn’t be hard to include a tool to combine grayscale textures into a packed RGB or RGBA.

Well, that part might not be so hard, but the current shader system would be in the way. There is no practical way to automatically adjust shaders to incorporate the changes of packing grayscale textures. You could do something to this extend with some editor scripts and a lot of shader variants.

The only reason something like Unreal can do this automatically is because shaders are generated from a graph. This makes it more artist friendly, but it also limits what you can do. It does allow for this kind of automatic channel packing.

[Chanhy]

@jvo3dc

You can use the alpha (A8) only format for a grayscale image. That’s how I do it now. I would also prefer to just have a 8 bit grayscale (L8) format as an option. And the grayscale with alpha format (L8A8).

Well, that part might not be so hard, but the current shader system would be in the way. There is no practical way to automatically adjust shaders to incorporate the changes of packing grayscale textures. You could do something to this extend with some editor scripts and a lot of shader variants.

The only reason something like Unreal can do this automatically is because shaders are generated from a graph. This makes it more artist friendly, but it also limits what you can do. It does allow for this kind of automatic channel packing.

Most shaders are already using packed textures, like the terrain shader: RGB - albedo, A - smoothness, or the standard shader (R - metallic, G - occlusion/height, A - smoothness).