Unity 3 Terrain problem !

Unity Engine
1

I have this problem:
Brushes for Raise/Lower, Paint Height and Smooth Height is weird pixelated and they shrinks when I change Terrain resolution (in this case from default 2000x2000 to 1000x200, other parameters default).Other Brushes for painting textures, grass, trees etc dont shrink but are also weird pixelated. This pixelization effect on the brush can be best seen when the brush size is set to 1. Then it becomes only a rectangle and its simply unusable…

Original Terrain resolution (2000x2000)…pixelated brush can be seen:

1000x200 Terrain resolution, brushes become shrinked:

Brush size set to 1:

So it is practically unusable…

Is this a Unity bug or im missing something?

2

I ported a terrain from 2.6. It behaved ok for a time. Now I have the same problem you describe. The brush is near useless as it steps across the grid’s cells in a very staccato fashion… the legato normal behavior is gone, the brush imprint is as you describe, no longer the reflection of the tool picked, but a squarish imprint that hangs on all of the grid’s undelying cells…

See my trials and tribulations on a later post…

3

We have this new problem too in Unity 3.1, it makes editing the terrain near impossible, or at least extremely frustrating.

It seems like the whole scene lags when trying to paint height and dragging the mouse button, causing large tall spikes on the terrain once the scene lag is over.

also when painting height… I can sometimes cause the grass and trees to move up, without the corresponding terrain moving up.

Is there a fix available ?

4

We haven’t found a way around it yet. The brushes at any reasonable detail move as if snapped to the terrain squares and update much more slowly than in 2.6.

This is what they degrade to as well. They only retain a semblance of the “image” if they are massive.

432126--14975--$UnityBrushError01.jpg

432126--14976--$UnityBrushError02.jpg

I’m assuming this is “working as intended”?

If that is true it’s a serious downgrade to the terrain engine. Takes me roughly 3x or more to get terrain to look reasonable and that includes the use of a lot of smoothing.

5

a hint of what the problem is or can be…
When importing projects from 2.6 to 3.xx it seems the terrain’s splat map/tiling are at a different resolution.
or the original map just does not get converted…

If you add a texture/edit textures for the terrain you should see the splat setting and the tiling sizes.
I am going to test and see if my intuition is on track… will post soon.

Update: was unable to confirm my suspicions.
The new terrain cursors on 3.0 are square unlike the round ones on 2.6.
The new cursor hangs while sweeping over the terrain, the highlight draws after a delay between each cell swept.

I used a brush size 1 both in 2.6 and 3.x
2.6 cursor/gizmo is in direct sync with the mouse cursor
3.0 cursor/gizmo lags behind enough that if you sweep the mouse over a screenwide surface you can see the gizmo lagging many tiles behind and when you stop the mouse cursor the gizmo catches up.

It also seems that in 2.6 when you blend you have to hit the same spot several times before the existing texture is completely replaced by the texture on the cursor.
…in 3.0 most times 2 hits and the new texture is 100%.

The lagging is really the issue, I think.

6

Thanks for having a look. Your results sound very similar to the problem we are seeing. I’m surprised not many others have run into this issue.

Hopefully we can get some attention from the “powers that be” soon.

7

most of the things you see are no bugs but normal due to enhancements of the terrain editor.

keeping a button pressed will reapply the function over and over again, be it painting, raising etc.
what seems fishy at least to me is that the framerate dependence on these applies went away which especially for texture painting is a problem if you don’t have a “shit box”. I already needed paint opacities in the 0.1 range for u2 … now I need even lower ones, making it laughable kind of …

as a consequence if you move it will do it all over which is slow, updating a ram texture that often especially if you sit on a 1024x1024 one and update single pixels primarily.

8

UPDATE:

I have noticed that if the tile size/factor is smaller than the brush size the gizmo shows a matching shape that appear in the selector. I have not tested all the ranges in sizes but enough to notice it.

The effect gets less noticeable if you bring the camera close to the terrain… then you start seeing the edges as pixelated or rather ‘tileated’. When the brush is smaller than the tile size, the gizmo will be ‘pixelated/tileated’.

On the effect of the gizmo lagging behind the mouse cursor, I have experienced a way to sweep over the terrain that seems to improve my ability to paint more effectively. I let the gizmo act as if a weight tied to a rubberband that is in turn tied to my mouse cursor, and I sweep the mouse in smaller concentric motions than the area in need of adjustment, and the gizmo follows somewhat with a yoyo effect and the painting gets done fairly fast.

When adjusting a precise location on the tarmac, I simply slow down and place the gizmo where needed and click repeatedly to get the change to kick in. This approach tends to let me adjust small portions of the tarmac more accurately than the old version of the painter.

I am still not convinced that the behavior is realistic. A paintbrush in a painter’s hand is not on a rubberband, obviously.
The lag is a problem.

Note: When my terrains were converted to 3.0(xxx) I noticed that the tiling effect showed across the entire terrain… I recreated the material using the same texture that was used in 2.6… and voila!, my terrain is now smooth again, showing the texture proper without the tiling effect.

While experimenting I also noticed that making changes to textures back and forth can lead to entire groups of objects being reset to the magenta horror(I call it). One example is the rabbit tutorial, if I run it straight in 2.6, no problems, nice fur… if I load an instance of it in 3.0, it is converted before it comes up and puhh puhh puh!! it produces a magenta rabbit… and I got errors on the shaders (#pragma clause)… I have not played with that enough to find out what the conversion is missing to address… my time is in a small bottle… perhaps I will soon make room to play more.

UPDATE2:
I have encountered somewhere haphazadly that the first texture listed in the textures box is the base texture for the terrain. Think if by some bad luck you are looking at a terrain that was heavily massaged where a second texture really became the prevailant texture, it might be a good thing that you remembered the first one is base. I think the interface should show what is what… as that knowledge is arbitrary and subject to changes as the tools are improved… a mouse-over-title-help would work if nothing better

I also see that the textures in the texture box do not draw as the texture really is… makes it hard to know what texture was used until you highlight a texture and click on edit to see its name…

and don’t forget to move the highlight away from a texture to actullay see it… you are out of luck if you only have 1 texture… then all you see is a fat blue square… you must click on edit to know what texture it is… the highlight should be a frame style around the texture box, that way the texture is not hidden. (SEE UPDATE3 below… new behavior)

One way I get around it is to repeat the base texture as a 2nd or 3rd texture, that way I can see it in spite of the highlight…

I also noticed that when you click edit on a texture the Edit Terrain texture dialog does not redraw, thus you could be tricked easily and wonder why your whole terrain went left after a change… …I wonder how many of you have fallen in the trap… and struggled to understand what happened?! …I struggled… and I will more than likely get tripped again. If you see a hole in your lawn, you don’t say hey everybody!!! watch out for the hole it may break your ankle!!! (instead) YOU PLUG IT UP!

Side comment: skip if you wish, not directly relevant to issue.

[I call those the tripping-rock-type-obstacles in the world of software interfaces.
It’s like the ideology that the programmer should try to think for the user at all times, and then they put a prompt on your screen that is reverse logic NO instead of YES so that you will not make an error… and all the fast people who are with the program trip on it… and there goes your cash-back option at the groceries store missed… or “…is your Amount correct?..” interpreted as “…DO you want cash back?..” because in real life one thinks of cash-back first not after the amount!!!
…yet I see people tripping on these approaches daily… because they keep being implemented in user interfaces…if I had a penny for each instance of that in the world, I would own the world.]

UPDATE3: (In the Inspector’s Textures box with the Edit Textures button while terrain is selected in hierarchy)
There is more to it than meets the eye… I open my project this morning, and the highlight on the texture icon is no longer… a slight blue line barely visible at bottom of icon, instead. That surely looks like what I was describing above!!! I am not sure if saving and closing the Editor has to do with it. …or if the type texture added is the key, …or if taking out all textures and adding a new (1st)one(as I just did) causes the behavior to change… flaky at least…

I hope this helps.

9

any updates on this problem described in the very top post of this thread? solutions? fixes?

i’m still getting screwed up brushes as described in the top post by changing terrain resolutions that are not “squared”… (500x1000, 200x3000). using latest Unity.

if there is no fix yet, how bad would it impact the game’s performance/framerates to have a “7000x7000” terrain, but only 2000 of the 7000 width is actually painted/used?

right now i’ve been simply building on a squared terrain, even while i need only a small part of it…
so if i only need a long narrow stretch of terrain (200width x 1000length), i would instead create a 1000width x1000length terrain then just paint/build on that 200width of the 1000width.

that “unused” 800width (or whatever amount we set it to) of terrain will eat into the game’s final framerates, but by how much? is it something to worry about?

10

I have these same issues. Biggest issue for me is that all the brushes are rectangles as you showed above. So when I try to modify the terrain it only does so in rectangular shapes and this looks horrible.

11

I know this topic is old, but it is EXACTLY describing my problem, even with the newest Unity version. :frowning: I have to make a map for my portfolio and the terrain tools are all extremly pixelated. I had no problems months/a few versions ago, didn’t use the painter then for a while and now I have the same issue then the OP.

Any fixes? Workarounds didn’t help me. :frowning:

12

I am also having this issue and its near impossible to use textures or create realistic looking terrains. Has anybody found a work around or possible fix? I cant continue creating my game with these problems.

Thanks in advance.

13

Thats exactly whats happening to mine its so annoying

14

We’re having a similar problem here.
If our brush size is down to one for raise / lower terrain, paint height, smooth height or paint texture then its a huge square, has no subtlety and moves in the “staccato” fashion mentioned above.

We’re tempted to try the “reset” option for the component but are worried that we’ll lose all the terrain texture definitions etc. in doing so.

Is it safe to assume no one found a solution yet?