Terrain Material

A terrain material system is different from other objects ones. It has the following structure:

• A height map based on which the terrain base relief is created.
• A set of main (base) terrain textures: diffuse, normal and holes. They are used to create a basic cover for a terrain, for example, to imitate the earth blanket with moss or grass.
• A layer (or material) which has the set of textures (diffuse, normal, specular) and the mask for them. It is used to augment a terrain with additional details, such as rocks, dirt, wood dust, snow, etc.

All of the textures and their parameters are modified via the Nodes panel.

See Also

Import of height, diffuse, normal, holes for base terrain and layer mask textures is available via the Import tab of the selected terrain. To specify the textures that you want to import check the box near the required texture.

After all of the boxes are checked and all of the textures and their parameters are specified, click Import.

Height Map

Diffuse, Normal and Holes Textures

Masks

A mask is the 1-channeled texture that specifies where to show the materials textures (diffuse, normal, specular). To import a mask for a layer, first you need to add a layer itself in the Layers tab. Just click Add and the layer will appear in the list. At the same time, the field for this layer mask import will appear in the Import tab.

Nodes Editor, Layers tab.

The Number of channels field indicates how much textures channels will be used for a terrain. The materials that are at the top of the hierarchy list will be taken first.

Nodes Editor, Import tab.

For each mask you need to specify a channel of the texture that will be used (for example, G-channel of RGBA texture). Since the texture could be a .psd file, you can specify the number of channel of the .psd file.

Channels in Photoshop file.	Channels in UnigineEditor.

Notice

You can use the same mask with the different channels specified for different layers.

Since terrain materials (layers) represent a hierarchy, you can create the child layer (material) and assign a parent mask to it. Also child materials can have their own masks that will be applied within the limits of the parent's mask.

To assign the parent mask (base mask) to the child material, you should choose the parent of the material and enable the mask base option.

Notice

Textures and parameters for a layer can be set either after or before the mask import.

When a terrain is created, its grid is automatically divided into smaller refined chucks of 257×257 vertices in size (shown in the Refined tab). Each surface has a unique set of textures, which, in fact, are parts cut out from the imported textures.

You can modify the following parameters in the Refined tab:

• Enabled - enable or disable the terrain chunk.
• Cast shadow - cast the shadows from the chunk terrain relief.
• Threshold - the flatness threshold for the chunk.
• Diffuse - the diffuse texture of the chunk.
• Normal - the normal texture of the chunk.
• Index - the index texture of the chunk.
• Mask - the mask of the chunk.

You can manually change a size of refined diffuse, normal and mask textures in the Texture Resolution field of the Parameters tab.

Paths to the refined diffuse, normal, mask and index textures is displayed at the File Structure field.

Coarse diffuse, normal, mask and index textures are generated automatically and are shown in the Coarse Texture field of the Parameters tab.

You can manually change a size of coarse diffuse, normal and mask textures in the Texture Resolution field of the Parameters tab.

In the Layers tab, you can performs the following operations with layers:

• Add - add a new layer to the list.
• Remove - remove a selected layer from the list.
• Clone - clone the selected layer.
• Up - move the layer upper in the hierarchy.
• Down - move the layer down in the hierarchy.

You can set the following layer textures and parameters. They can be modified either after or before the mask import.

• Name - the name of the material.
• Parent - the parent material in materials hierarchy.
• Overlap - the overlap blending mode.

  • Overlap mode for detail materials is simply for drawing them atop of terrain (without blending). Unlike Overlay, this mode to render detail without any color alternation, for example, flowers, stones, etc.

  • If this option is disabled, the material is blending in overlay blending mode. When detail materials are rendered in Overlay mode, the colors of the surface and detail material diffuse textures are blended.

• Mask Base - use the mask of the parent material
• Transform - layer coordinates transformation.
  • Scale X - tile of the textures along the X axis. For example, by the scale of 2 the texture will be twice as small (it would have two tiles instead of one).
  • Scale Y - tile of the textures along the Y axis.

  The value of transform scale is 16x16.	The value of transform scale is 128x128.

  • Offset X - a textures offset along the X axis. For example, by the offset of 0.5 the texture is rendered as if its left corner is in the middle of the texture.
  • Offset Y - a textures offset along the Y axis.

  

  Changing the offset value: 0 -> 0.1 -> 0.2.
• Value - the blending value.
• Width - the blending width.
• Threshold - the blending threshold.
• Diffuse - the path to the diffuse texture.
  • Scale - the intensity scale of the diffuse texture.
• Normal - the path to the normal texture.
  • Scale - the intensity scale of the normal texture.
• Specular - the path to the specular texture.
  • Scale - the intensity scale of the specular texture.
• Diffuse Array - the array layer diffuse textures and its size.
• Normal Array - the array of layer normal textures and its size.
• Specular Array - the array of layer specular textures and its size.

Value, Width and Threshold Parameters

Value, Width and Threshold parameters allow you to control the blending of the layer according to the mask.

Notice

All of the parameters have the [0;1] range.

For example, we have the following mask and the following alpha channel of the layer's diffuse texture:

The mask

The alpha channel

The Value parameter controls the spread intensity of the layer. Lower values provide bigger spread.

The high value

The low value

The Width parameter controls the width of blending with a layer. Higher values provide wider areas.

The low value

The high value

The Threshold parameter controls smoothness of blending. Higher values provide smoother results.

The low value

The high value

After loading of all the textures and finishing their editing in Terrain Editor, it is strongly recommended to compress them for more efficient usage of the memory. The Compress option compresses refined diffuse, normal, and mask textures, as well as their coarse textures. Layer textures are not compressed.

The following conversion is done:

• R8 to ATI1
• RG8 to ATI2
• RGB8 to DXT1
• RGBA8 to DXT5

On the contrary, the Decompress option decompresses all compressed textures mentioned above.

You can export any of your basic textures via the Export tab. Just press Export near the required texture. In the opened dialog window choose the extension and a path to the texture.

For a height map, you need to specify a Max Height parameter, which is equal to the terrain maximum height.