ChrisHekman wrote:EFS wrote:Did you notice my response from a week ago? You asked if that's what I meant, and it wasn't. Again, sorry for the unclarity. It would be really helpful to know if this is planned or not, and if it is, what the expected timeline (ie: so far away I shouldn't hold my breath, or within the next few updates) is.
Basically: Do I stick to Octane in 3ds max, or am I planning on using octane in Unity to take advantage of easier terrain stuff. Which, for me, requires displacement mapping to make it worth it.
Thanks!
The second example I gave ealier in this thread will give you what you mean. You can use an PBR override material on a place and then give that material a heightmap etc.
To be clear, you're saying that there will be no way to use displacement or full PBR texturing on a terrain, correct? It would be great if we had some way to supply full PBR to the terrain, otherwise we are left with sub-par octane rendering for the terrain vs. a plane. Of course, the point is to have terrain in Octane, not to have to use a plane, right? I'm sure there are many workflows to getting a mesh rendering out as a "terrain" with greater control ... the question is can we use the unity terrain system to render terrain without losing visual fidelity?
There's a reason there are so many terrain plug-ins on Unity (let alone custom shaders written that aren't posted) ... the built in Unity terrain, as is, is not current gen without supporting certain features. If the terrain system is really going to be supported by Octane, shouldn't it be done in a way that doesn't make it sub-par visually compared to non-terrain? I'm not knocking getting terrain working with Octane -- I'm just questioning why you're stopping short of mapping the full amount of PBR textures and displacement.
Is there a technical reason for this? If you can already blend the albedo and normal with the splatmaps, why not give us a component that lets us supply a metallic and roughness as well? Furthermore, unless its going to be viable to create an override material for a terrain, why not just allow us to set a displacement texture as well right there with a strength slider? I get that you guys are re-routing textures to octane and not using any shaders from Unity. I find it hard to believe that there's no way to create a Unity Editor component (or _something_) that allows us to specify additional textures.
I'm not ungrateful for the terrain that has been implemented (rather, I think its great, which is why I'm pushing so hard to understand this), but when we're dealing with a physically correct rendering engine, why would we want to lose metallic, roughness, and displacement textures? Obviously we can use a plane ... but that's no longer the unity terrain system, and I'm sure you're aware of the many benefits of the terrain system vs. a plane, since otherwise you guys wouldn't be implementing it ...
[Edit - Figured I may as well explain my use-case. I already own the Octane for 3ds Max. I'm interested in Octane for Unity for two reasons: the first is to hopefully make rendering still shots a bit quicker to put together (we don't need perfection, but rather, the ability to quickly iterate with fine tuned control), and the second is to use with timeline for exporting movies. While the terrain as-is is still an improvement for #2 (since there's still a reason to use Octane for Unity and it just gives one more tool), it does not give any improvement for #1 unless we take a step down in visual quality. My hope is that when OSL comes out, someone will create a node based editor for it much like ASE, and that the terrain system will render out as high-quality as a plane will. At that point, I would seriously consider using Unity to render out stills simply for the ease-of-use and the ability to customize the editor through c# scripting, since we're already so deep in Unity).