The Great Grass Dilemma

SomeGuy22 · December 31, 2020, 4:45am

It’s not a bug, I got a response to my bug report and it turns out the brush strength is like that on purpose. See here:

So they have intentionally clamped the slider to specific values and supposedly also upped the base strength when it comes to detail painting. There’s a few reasons why it worked better the old way, here’s what I wrote in response as thoughts on the matter:

Yes, with Opacity lowered you are able to paint at lower densities, but a continuous hold on a specific position will keep adding details whereas a lowered Target Strength will clamp your paint action after a certain point. This makes it easier to quickly paint each detail at their desired density without being overly precise in how much you click on a certain area. In addition, the Shift-remove (and Ctrl-remove) tool for detail painting works based on the same opacity. This makes it pretty inconvenient to remove details if you utilize Opacity instead of Target Strength. For example, if you build up a large patch of details using a low Opacity, you have to wait that same amount of time when you shift-remove that area unless you then modify opacity again. You can see how this would be tedious over time if you need to constantly revert a detail’s density and then go back to painting with a low Opacity. Using the old unlocked Target Strength instead, you could always leave Opacity at value 1 for quick removal and still have each detail be at any desired density because it incorporates a limit rather than a weight over time.

But I don’t claim to know anything behind the curtain as to what the Unity devs may want here, probably just a way to streamline the tool and make it more accessible somehow? Regardless, it’s not up to us sadly and that’s the change they went for so it is what it is for now.

There is a workaround though, I posted it earlier up in the thread. To solve this issue, I was able to recreate the entire detail paint tool using the Experimental Terrain API, and with it an unclamped target strength value to paint at lower densities. I posted the code publicly on this thread which also documents the detail paint issue. Just put the script into an Editor folder and you should be able to use the tool as listed underneath the “paint” options for terrain. Be aware of the drawbacks though. Hope that helps!