So I set aside some time today to download and play around with paintJob from the Blacksmith Demo from waaaay back.
And while I see why this is just a demo tool for now, call me amazed. It actually works as advertised, once you get around its quirks. Given you are interested in UnityGrass and Vertex Lit detail meshes, this seems to be a pretty important addition to the Unity Editor.
I am still struggling with the system though. Some questions to other people using or having used paintJob, or a nice Unity guy who is more knowledgeable about it:
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Why is the paintJob Script so damn slow? Seems like as soon as I have used the script to paint something on the proxy terrain, every time I select the paintJob GameObject everything gets slowed down to a crawl until I can select another gameObject.
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If paintJob copies the grass and detail layers every time you open it… why do the terrain settings get reset (like grass tint, speed, bending and size)? Seems like a pain to go and edit that after every change.
I feel like this is quite a useful tool given that someone would spend another few days polishing the tool and maybe integrate it into Unity proper. Currently, besides the rather sluggish performance of opening and closing the tool, I find mostly one fault with it:
The wind bending of grass is not synced between terrain and the paintJob Proxy terrain. Which makes for a rather weird offset in bending at the borders between the two different sets of grass painted on terrain and meshes. Given that I, like many others, are also interested in painting grass on meshes to integrate meshes more into the terrain, I would love to get rid of this.
As far as I tried paintJob can only be used for painting on meshes, not on the terrain itself. Why not combined the two into one proxy terrain, so that users could use that to paint vegation on, and have a single terrain instance run their vegatation for everything?