Unity terrain

Forums: Unity terrain
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Re: Unity terrain

Postby ChrisHekman » Tue Jan 02, 2018 9:35 am

ChrisHekman Tue Jan 02, 2018 9:35 am
EFS wrote:Also, any chance of getting the trees/grass working with Octane? What I would love is to have something like Terrain Composer or CTS generate a terrain, along with the vegetation, and then see it in Octane :).

Yes, this is in the planning.
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Re: Unity terrain

Postby EFS » Thu Jan 04, 2018 7:51 pm

EFS Thu Jan 04, 2018 7:51 pm
ChrisHekman wrote:
EFS wrote:Also, any chance of getting the trees/grass working with Octane? What I would love is to have something like Terrain Composer or CTS generate a terrain, along with the vegetation, and then see it in Octane :).

Yes, this is in the planning.


Heightmaps as well? The level of realism between a terrain with and without heightmaps is huge, and I'm sure you are well aware :).
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Re: Unity terrain

Postby DNArt » Sat Jan 20, 2018 12:49 pm

DNArt Sat Jan 20, 2018 12:49 pm
Hi all

Any progress on this topic?

I have octane for Blender and Unity but have no clue how to render a terrain in any of these.
Is this a general octane issue?
Are there 3th party solutions to this ?

i can easily imagine getting hooked on octane but .
Must i render the terrain with an other render engine and add in manually in AE or PS ?
Any help or tips would be appreciated :)
Happy weekend
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Re: Unity terrain

Postby ChrisHekman » Tue Jan 23, 2018 12:44 pm

ChrisHekman Tue Jan 23, 2018 12:44 pm
EFS wrote:
ChrisHekman wrote:
EFS wrote:Also, any chance of getting the trees/grass working with Octane? What I would love is to have something like Terrain Composer or CTS generate a terrain, along with the vegetation, and then see it in Octane :).

Yes, this is in the planning.


Heightmaps as well? The level of realism between a terrain with and without heightmaps is huge, and I'm sure you are well aware :).


The latest release of Octane for Unity already supports unity terrains. We copy over whatever the unity terrain heightmap is. So if you set the unity heightmap, the octane heightmap will be the same.
Is that what you mean?


DNArt wrote:Hi all

Any progress on this topic?

I have octane for Blender and Unity but have no clue how to render a terrain in any of these.
Is this a general octane issue?
Are there 3th party solutions to this ?

i can easily imagine getting hooked on octane but .
Must i render the terrain with an other render engine and add in manually in AE or PS ?
Any help or tips would be appreciated :)
Happy weekend


You can render a terrain in unity using unity terrains. That should show in octane. (Trees/grass are comming later)

Otherwise what you can try is the following:
Create a plane in unity.
Create a new material with a PBR Override shader. Click view source
Then create the following nodes (Displacement node, heightmap texture, diffuse material)
Attachments
terrain.png
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Re: Unity terrain

Postby EFS » Wed Jan 24, 2018 1:52 am

EFS Wed Jan 24, 2018 1:52 am
ChrisHekman wrote:The latest release of Octane for Unity already supports unity terrains. We copy over whatever the unity terrain heightmap is. So if you set the unity heightmap, the octane heightmap will be the same.
Is that what you mean?


Sorry for the ambiguity. I meant, how do we use displacement maps with terrain? The heightmap of the terrain I understand -- that's the base shape of the ground. But in terms of the textures themselves, how do we hook into Specular/AO/Height? Basically, how do we use all the standard PBR textures with a texture and not just Albedo/Norma (I assume the glossiness is used as the alpha channel of the albedo right now?).

What I'm trying to ask is how we get the terrain to look as good as a mesh in terms of using all the standard PBR textures.
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Re: Unity terrain

Postby EFS » Tue Jan 30, 2018 7:34 pm

EFS Tue Jan 30, 2018 7:34 pm
ChrisHekman wrote:
EFS wrote:
ChrisHekman wrote:The latest release of Octane for Unity already supports unity terrains. We copy over whatever the unity terrain heightmap is. So if you set the unity heightmap, the octane heightmap will be the same.
Is that what you mean?


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!
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Re: Unity terrain

Postby ChrisHekman » Wed Jan 31, 2018 9:34 am

ChrisHekman Wed Jan 31, 2018 9:34 am
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.
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Re: Unity terrain

Postby EFS » Fri Feb 02, 2018 2:03 pm

EFS Fri Feb 02, 2018 2:03 pm
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).
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