I am working with the Unity terrain engine and I need to manipulate each terrain texture mask directly. In other engines you can usually import or edit a greyscale image (terrain mask) for this purpose, but at first glance I saw no such ability using Unity’'s default editor.
If that’s the case, it looks like I might get that functionality here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/30299-Tom-s-Terrain-Tools-(update-new-version-released)?highlight=terrain+texture
Does Unity not allow you to import a terrain texture mask image in the same way you can import a heightmap?
Can I use Toms terrain tools for the function I require? Is that the only way to achieve the interactivity I need?
Thank you!
without writing functionality that manually alters the splatmap, its indeed impossible to control it. only the heightmap can by default be brought in, the rest is expected / assumed to be created in unity
How does Unity store that information then? Directly in the vertices of terrain?
And as for the terrain tools I linked to, do those not give me the functionality I’m after? I haven’t gotten to a point where I can try them myself.
Thanks again.
There are no “vertices of the terrain”
The terrain is based on the splatmaps and the heightmap. All the information to what degree which of the 4 textures per splatmap is visible at each point is controlled by one of the 4 color channels on the splat map (which you could see as grayscale kind off)
Unsure if the terrain toolkit offers the option to import single color channels, but you can always combine up 4 of these into a ARGB32 texture and import that one through the toolkit for example. That then would be “just a splatmap”
Just keep in mind: each splat map means a new renderpass for the terrain so don’t add them just for sake of “more texture viarity” cause the performance hit from multiple passes on the terrain aren’t needfully light on mid to low range machines.
There are no “vertices of the terrain”
The terrain is based on the splatmaps and the heightmap. All the information to what degree which of the 4 textures per splatmap is visible at each point is controlled by one of the 4 color channels on the splat map (which you could see as grayscale kind off)
Unsure if the terrain toolkit offers the option to import single color channels, but you can always combine up 4 of these into a ARGB32 texture and import that one through the toolkit for example. That then would be “just a splatmap”
Just keep in mind: each splat map means a new renderpass for the terrain so don’t add them just for sake of “more texture viarity” cause the performance hit from multiple passes on the terrain aren’t needfully light on mid to low range machines.