I want to create some HQ terrains and use some use displacement textures on them, can anybody recommend a good terrain shader that supports displacement? i saw this on the asset store - Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making
does anyone recommend this? it looks promising but it has 4 stars so i’m trying to think what could be wrong with it…
i also saw more expensive terrain systems like RTP pack https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/5664 and megasplat https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/76166
that apparently have custom shaders that can use dislacement, and i dont know what to pick, i do need a high quality shader that will work really well and look really good, but is it really necessary to get one of these expensive systems?
plz advise
That first one looks like it’s basically the Unity terrain shader that ships with Unity, but limited to 4 texture layers (unlike the built in shader’s 8) and adding displaced tesselation. If that’s all you need, then that’ll work.
RTP and MegaSplat add a ton more features like more realistic blending between layers, the option to use triplanar texturing so you can do cliffs or steep hills with out the textures stretching badly, and many more features. RTP’s big selling point is really the ability to do smaller geometric details via “POM” (parallax occlusion mapping), where as MegaSplat can use up to 256 texture layers (vs default Unity and RTP’s 8). Both support tesselation, but RTP only supports it for terrain mesh smoothing and large scale features, where MegaSplat uses tesselation for both large and small scale geometric features.
Btw, by “small geometric features” I mean per layer height maps.
As far as POM vs Tessellation for this, POM can much more easily represent very small details that would be too expensive to show using tessellation, but POM is also much more expensive in general and can have more obvious artifacts especially with deeper height offsets.
The main issue with POM is that it doesn’t scale well to multiple layers of texture. You can use something like Octree Occlusion Mapping to reduce this cost, but it’s still very slow to take that many textures samples on every pixel, and it doesn’t look as nice up close as good tessellation can.
What I’ve found to work really well is a small amount of Parallax or POM combined with tessellation. The large forms are roughed out by the tessellation, and the micro details are picked up by the parallax. I’ve found this to be the best blend between both worlds in MegaSplat, as it’s only one extra set of samples on the diffuse maps vs. 8-24.