Aug
26
2013

Mesh Terrain Texturing/SplatMap Tool (wip)

An article by mgear

mesh_splatmap_editor_plugin_unity_1

Small editor plugin for creating splatmap/splatmask for mesh based terrain. (not terrain object)

Current features:
– Create splatmap based on face angles (adjustable slope angles)
– Texture painting (paint to any layer R, G, B, A)
– Obstacle detection (if collider is founded on mesh, different material is splatted around it, with custom radius. See main image, different texture around objects)
– Custom shader (4 textures, splatmask RGBA)
– Splatmap can be any resolution (low resolution works quite nicely too, if blurred)
– Gaussion blur function (adjustable strength)
– Basic random instantiate to mesh surface (pick prefab, enter amount)
– Texture paint: with custom brush (any texture)
– Texture paint: Circle brush, size, strength (alpha)
– Live preview (lower resolution) when adjusting splatmask generation angles
– Esc key to stop painting mode
– Collision mask: Enable/Disable checking, Layer dropdown for collision objects layer selection
– Extras: Plain color shader (instead of textures)
–

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CURRENT BUG / TODO LIST:
~~– Mask texture is not saved when texture painting on it~~
– Mask texture gets cleared from the shader if you enter Play mode (need to manually assign it to SplatMask – slot)
~~– Doesnt work with non-square mesh (Can be fixed with couple lines)~~
~~– Doesnt work with hills over 200m (Can be fixed with couple lines)~~
~~– Playmode clears values..~~
– Mousepanning gets stuck if in texture paint mode (have to press play/stop)
– Missing editor undo support
– Custom brush resize (currently texture size is used directly)
– Could have bake to vertex colors and vertex color mask shader
– If terrain is over 65k vertices and gets splitted, problems..
– Needs cancellable progress bars for various actions..
– Separate user texture painting/drawings texture (so it wont get cleared when splatmask is re-generated)
– Add normal maps support for shaders
– More to be added..

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TODO:
~~– User could select which layer is used for object collider checking~~
– Extra custom layer mask (so that user painted splats wont disappear if splatmap is regenerated)
~~– Realtime previews for adjusting mesh slope angles~~
– Gaussian blur for invidual channels?
– Could bake ambient occlusion also? Or some lighting stuff?
– Extra channels on shader? 4 materials is not enough?
– Needs some height adjustment also (mountain tops different material?)

If this works, will try to put it in store later.. Let me know if you have request/ideas for features.

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About the Author:

.fi

17 Comments + Add Comment

tny 03/09/2013 at 17:53

nice, i need a tool like this!

Reply
Rob 08/10/2013 at 09:41

Great, any progress on this? I would certainly make good use of it. 🙂

Reply
- mgear 10/10/2013 at 09:52
  
  i guess i can add “early bird” version here in few weeks,
  preparing the store ready version is going to take quite some time still.
  
  Reply
mcmorry 01/12/2013 at 12:09

Very interesting. I really need something like this. I’d buy already the alpha 🙂
Please, let me know if interested.

Reply
- mgear 02/12/2013 at 23:15
  
  ok, its coming up next week.
  
  Reply
  - mcmorry 11/12/2013 at 02:11
    
    Hi, any news? Did you release it on the asset store?
    
    Reply
    - mgear 11/12/2013 at 13:44
      
      oh, last week was already ‘this week’ 🙂 i’ll put it in the blog before this coming sunday.
      
      (plenty of bugs to fix, features to add before asset store, so that is still long way to go)
      
      Reply
      - mcmorry 11/12/2013 at 14:40
        
        Thank you, I’ll be very happy to help you improving the product, bug tests, etc.
mgear 11/02/2014 at 11:04

“shader that blends 16 different textures from a texture atlas
with a blending mode based on titans quest”
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/227649-Atlas-Terrain-Shader

Reply
mgear 10/03/2014 at 23:28

Diffuse_Specular_Normal_Splatmapped shader:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/181486-Shader-Experiments

Reply
mgear 25/03/2014 at 18:31

“Landscape creation and rendering in REDengine 3”
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020197/Landscape-Creation-and-Rendering-in

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mgear 11/07/2014 at 20:54

painting with normal map:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/solved-displacementpaint-texturing-using-a-displacement-map.256118/

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mgear 19/07/2014 at 01:45

reading .raw heightmap: (could be useful to be able to generate terrain mesh from heightmap also)
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/478759/how-are-the-bytes-in-a-16bit-heightmap-organized.html

Reply
mgear 15/03/2017 at 15:13

[interesting video] ‘Ghost Recon Wildlands’: Terrain Tools and Technology:
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024029/-Ghost-Recon-Wildlands-Terrain

Reply
mgear 21/05/2019 at 06:54

this project source code now available here
https://github.com/unitycoder/MeshSplatTools

Reply
- Nico 17/06/2019 at 03:45
  
  Hi! Amazing job: it’s really impressive! Do you have any documentation on how to use it?
  I am not being very able to apply the splat texture on custom obj (i am proably missing something quite obious but I am not bein able to figure this out!).
  I opened your example scene, added my .Obj, attached the MeshSplat Tool and try to apply it. The texture only applies to teh “meshterrain_lite” object that is there by default, but not to my object!
  Thanks anyway, again, amazing job!
  
  Reply
Anjay 12/05/2023 at 06:42

Sir can you provide me custom splatted mesh Terrain Shader?

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