LandscapeAutoMaterial (LAM) is a comprehensive toolset for terrain and foliage creation. It’s a reimplementation of a popular Unreal Engine 4 tool in Unity. With LAM, your terrain is textured automatically according to height and slope, and grass and detail meshes are added automatically according to complex weighting rules. And, of course, you can reconfigure and override any and all automatic settings.
LAM includes a preconfigured forest setting, with several trees, grass and rock meshes. Just put one prefab in the scene - and start painting!
See the process (and results) in this video. All assets you see here are INCLUDED in the package.
LAM feature list: Terrain shader
A set of custom physical-based terrain shaders
Automated terrain texturing based on slope and height, with full override ability.
Height-based layers mixing
Triplanar texturing support, eliminating “stretching” on slopes
Multi-UV mixing to reduce repetitive tiles in distance
DX11 tessellation support.
Additional coloring map to reduce repetitiveness
Paintable coloring layer - paint color directly on terrain
Foliage shaders
Custom tree shaders with wind animation and leaf translucency, working with both built-in and prefab-based trees.
Custom grass shader with translucency and texture-based wind animation.
Advanced foliage painting
Multi-foliage brush tool that can paint several foliage types simultaneously - including mixing grass and trees.
Auto-painter system that intelligently places foliage based on terrain textures, slope, and noise mask, with almost-realtime updates.
Custom foliage system (FoliagePainter Pro)
Fully custom system allowing painting meshes on terrain
Supports any shader, not just the ones included in package
Automatically batches foliage instances for draw-call reduction
Supports fully-static and runtime batching
Can be used to paint ANY prefab on terrain - lights, particle effects, etc.
Fully supported by advanced painting tools in the package.
We don’t have anything for streams out-of-the-box right now, but most other river tools should work with LAM - it’s just terrain after all.
As for performance, vanilla terrain is probably faster, but that’s not really a fair comparison - LAM looks a lot better and is richer in features.
You can place ANY trees you want - custom meshes, SpeedTree, Tree Creator trees, whatever, either through built-in terrain mechanism or our custom BatchedFoliage script (the latter won’t batch trees, though). And once placed they work as usual, nothing special there.
Is there anything in specific that requires that version or do you know if it will work on older v5X versions.
If you look at the only STATS we have available you are possibly eliminating MANY possible sales.
I personally would have wanted a v5.2.2 in the least and that would very likely add many more possible sales.
You can submit with multiple version.
The users will get the one that he is attempting to buy/download it with.
Many assets gets submitted with the latest version or to new a aversion and then they dont get the sales they wanted and gives the impression that the package is no good and fails as a product.
That’s pretty old data, and right now most people are probably on 5.3
That said, we really should investigate compatibility with older versions - we hadn’t yet. There’s a good chance LAM would work with 5.2.2 or even older.
Read on your website something about a winter (and other) pack(s) available for Unreal engine. Will these packs also be available for Unity? If so, when do you think they will be ready and also, will these be sold as a seperate package, or free (as updates to LAM)?
It also looks like the grass/vegetation has shadow support? Are the grass/vegetation meshes following the terrain slope angle?
The packs will be available for Unity, but I can’t give any concrete dates right now. They will be done when they’re done (-8
The packs are going to be in separate packages.
All grass can cast shadows. This is one of the main reasons why we had to build a custom foliage system: so we can use grass with more advanced shaders. In fact, LAM allows use of absolutely any shader on foliage - PBR, shadows, translucency, whatever. Of course, shadows come with a performance cost.
As for the slope - yes, there’s a “slope following” value in our foliage system that defines whether given mesh angles with the slope or not. It goes from 0 to 1, so grass can even be set to kind-of lean towards terrain slope, but not completely.
It’s a Unity Terrain, but with several scripts attached. There’s more info in the manual (which is available here), but briefly, there are 3 scripts: TerrainTool to support terrain shading, AutoPainter to support automatic foliage placement and BatchedFoliage which is our custom foliage system. All can work independently (i.e. you can choose what parts of the system you want); and the first two only work when changing terrain, so you could concievably build the terrain and then remove them.
Yep, it does! We do this sort-of-weird thing where the first splat texture on the terrain is never rendered, but used to mark automatic texturing areas, and we add a few more textures to the Unity-recognized ones, but other than that it’s all built-in textures, splatmaps and heightmaps.
Meaning that it should work with heightmap and splatmap editing tools like Gaia out of the box.
Well, the idea of this tool is that you don’t really need lots of brush work - most of terrain is textured and covered with vegetation automatically, and then you provide the lovely details.
Hmm… well I don’t see us as competitors, more as potential collaborators with tool-sets that have different strengths, and most people like more options rather than less. Offer is open any time
Anyways, staying out of your forum now - apologies if it was seen as an intrusion. Keep up the awesome work!
VEAGamesTeam, I would love to see a GAIA integration personally. As mentioned previously, it would be great to auto-generate large terrains using GAIA and then run LAM to automagically apply all of the extra shaders, etc. Obviously, you can always go into the Terrain menu to fine tune things.
As Adam mentioned, I think collaboration would be very powerful since you are two different tool-sets. If an integration is not possible I would love for you to possibly help me out with a workflow that would help me be able to use GAIA with LAM.
