[Released] Vertex Tools Pro – Heightbased PBR Material Blending, Flowmapping and Mesh Deform

Community Showcases
1

1920×1080 262 KB

Vertex Tools Pro v2.1.1
– Available on the Asset Store –
– Simple HeightBased Blending webGL Demo –
– Standalone Demoscene for MAC –
– Standalone Demoscene for Windows (64bit) –

Hi everyone,
we are happy to announce that we finished working on our latest asset: Vertex Tools Pro.

1920×1080 196 KB

What is Vertex Tools Pro?
Vertex Tools Pro is a feature packed editor extension optimized for Unity 5 and its physically based rendering. We aimed to create a workflow that is at the same time as artist friendly as possible and still ensures high performance realtime rendering. Vertex Tools Pro comes with a fully functional Vertex Painter, a Vertex Deformer and Flowmapping as well as with a couple of PBR-Shaders especially created for this tool.

1920×1080 533 KB

Vertex Painter
The Vertex Painter allows for simple editing of both static or non-static meshes’ vertex colors. It reaches its full potential when used with the complementary shaders, that also come with this package. The shader itself blends up to 3 PBR materials with several optional settings.
A key feature of the shader is of course its blending, which is not only calculated by the pure vertex colors. You also have the opportunity to influence the blending by the height maps of the different materials, thus creating detailed and individual texturing with one Unity material. To further increase the quality and the feel of the blending, the shader uses an optional enhanced parallax mapping as well as some other features (eg. heightbased transparency).
The package also contains a 2-Material-Blend-Glass Shader with the same functionality plus optional refraction and blur.

1920×1080 171 KB

Vertex Deformer
Based on the same workflow as the Vertex Painter, the Vertex Deformer allows you to deform meshes with ease. We provide options to extrude/intrude, pinch, push/pull & smooth vertices.

Flowmapper
In addition to the described shader features, all of them also support the use of flow data. Flow data itself is vertex based and can easily be processed from a given RGB-Flowmap. Another possibility to use flowmap data is to process it directly and automatically from the geometry itself which ensures physically correct flow results.

SpeedTree Support
The latest version (2.1.1) of VTP allows you to paint your SpeedTrees with vertex colors and therefore blend up to three different pbr materials on your leaves and trunks. Our VTP-Speedtree Shaders even allow for tessellation and heightbased blending on trunks and advanced translucency on leaves!

1920×1080 408 KB

API
Lastly, we provide an API which allows painting and deforming of non-static objects during runtime.
Detailed information on how to use the API will follow.

1920×1080 371 KB

Thanks for your interest! As always, any suggestions, comments and critics are highly appreciated. Please ask all your questions below and we try our best to answer them as soon as possible!

– Comparison Screenshot –

Without Vertex Tools Pro

With Vertex Tools Pro

Info for Substance Designer users:
We uploaded a sample material with outputs for our smoothness metallic blend shader. You can easily copy these nodes and outputs into your own materials: Dropbox

1366×766 78.1 KB

12 Likes
2

Any word on Ambient Occlusion Baking? Is it possible? Any plans? I am currently evaluating different approaches on baking AO.

3

It is not yet possible, but it’s on our roadmap. We will create a poll in just a minute to prioritize the next steps based on your wishes. As always, any participation is highly appreciated.

4

As requested, a more stylized material blended with Vertex Tools Pro.

1920×1080 272 KB

As always, comments & critics are highly appreciated.

1 Like
5

This looks insanely good, I am sure many will agree this will elevate visuals tenfold, I don’t care what the price is I just want it :smile: Great job.

1 Like
6

Thanks a lot :slight_smile:

A bit more insight in the process of painting and blending based on heightmaps for you. More to follow soon.

As always, any critics & comments are highly appreciated.

3 Likes
7

Hey again,

here’s another short video about our glass shader and flow maps this time. Here you can see how easy it is to achieve some kind of rain effect on windows for example.
Again, more to follow soon!

As always, any critics & comments are highly appreciated.

4 Likes
8

Wishful thinking but would this work on terrains? Or would I need to export the terrain to OBJ and paint the terrain OBJ manually? I really want to use PBR on my terrains so looking for a workaround :slight_smile: Also do you know the initial price when released?

9

Hey tapticc,

it does currently not work on terrain. We are currently discussing two possibility. Either support native terrain painting or provide you with a tool to automatically convert the terrain to mesh. With our provided tools to deform you would still be able to polish the terrain after it’s a mesh. What would you prefer?

For pricing: Currently discussing that too. Any suggestions? :smile: :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks for your feedback and

as always, any further critics & comments are highly appreciated.

10

H

Hi there, there is a script to convert terrain to mesh although it doesn’t split into chunks, but thats a different issue!

http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=TerrainObjExporter

I dont expect your asset to split terrains or export them, if it did paint terrains would only be beneficial if it included pbr shading so export to mesh may be better.

Price wise its tricky although I know Gaia did well by having a sale in the first week and getting plenty of rave reviews :wink:

11

I’m particularly interested in the API and looking forward to any runtime changes which can be made. Part of my game includes building and it would be great to be able to make walls change over time, for example gather sand.

12

added to watch list,
why all the cool assets must tease us like this while in review :rage:

13

Well, our API is one way to do it. Buuuut, we will provide an update with a Vertex Color Animator. So if you just want to change something over time, you can paint, set keyframes as you like. Just like Unitys Animation Timeline :slight_smile: The Vertex Color Animtor will then again be also accessible via our API.

Well, we would also love to be in the store already :wink: Sorry :frowning:

As always, any further critics & comments are highly appreciated.

1 Like
14

Thanks for the update, hope it gets through review 1st time :slight_smile:

15

Hey again,

we received some messages asking for a more detailled insight in the process of using mesh geometry for flowdata.

Here you go. Additionally we also covered our deform tool.

As always, any critics & comments are highly appreciated.

7 Likes
16

Great video! I already have some uses for this and can’t wait for the release. :slight_smile:

17

Can’t wait to get my hands on the glass shader, looks awesome!

18

Hi any chance of seeing the realistic brick textures before and after using the vertex tools? :slight_smile:

19

Hi,

Can I learn more about the flow map features?
-can we generate flow map textures from mesh?
-can we bake flow map texture to vertex colors? what if the mesh already have some vcolor data we want to keep?
-does the api include those features?
-Are there any incoming features that helps us alter the flow map creation? vortex areas, speed change areas for generated map, blocking surfaces…etc

Any info about the price range? Does it come with a dll or the C# code?

Thanks for your time.

20

Hey,

thanks for your feedback and questions.

Will come later this day :slight_smile:

Sort of. For a better performance our shader does not work with flow map textures but instead with vertex based flow map data. So the generated mesh based flow data are written into the vertices, not a texture.

Yes, you can import a FlowMap Texture and bake the flow data to vertex based information. All Vertex colors will be untouched, so yeah, Blending combined with FlowMap Support works :slight_smile:

The API in the submitted version is currently a v0.8. It currently supports Painting, Deforming and calculating FlowData from Mesh (usefull after a realtime deform). More features will be submitted with updates. Suggestions welcome.

Yes. We plan to make the flow data fully paintable with a brush. This also includes change of speeds :slight_smile: Not quite sure if it will be in the first update, but it is a hot To-Do :slight_smile:

C# of course :slight_smile: Though we would really like to hear about any “missing” features or your wishes.

Still did not decide that. Will keep you updated about that.

As always, any further critics & comments (& questions of course) are highly appreciated.

1 Like