TerraFormer - Advanced Terrain Shader

🌄 TerraFormer comes with 2 types of Standard & Tessellated (HDRP Only) versions each supporting up to 8 terrain layers in 1 pass exclusively developed for HDRP & URP.

The package also comes with 2 demo scenes of “Island” & “Mountains” to see the end result and a test-bed for changing terrain material parameters in real-time while targeting fully PBR rendering and high-end graphics.

TerraFormer works out of the box with any 3D environment assets including NatureManufacture's. The 2 screenshots with mountains and trees are from Mountain Environment - Dynamic Nature where we only changed its default Unity terrain material with TerraFormer and boom 🌟

TerraFormer is produced on top of ShaderGraph where you can edit and customize any nodes and functions based on your needs while holding the power of Unity's ShaderGraph system and guaranteed for the best performance.

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Using TerraFormer material on your terrains, you can get creative by feeding your own PBR terrain textures and create various styles and visuals based on the art concept of your project and continue with level designing stages so much easier and more beautiful in terms of visuals.

One of the key features of these shaders is performance as we could gain lower rendering time in milliseconds even compared to Unity’s default terrain shader in URP while providing dozens of fancy rendering features for a fully photorealistic shading as never seen before in any terrain shaders in Unity.

Also in terms of performance, memory footprint and build/compile time, we used Static Branching instead of Shader Keywords which results in quicker load times and lower runtime memory usage and you don't need to increase Shader Keywords limit in project at all.

Also, we tried our best to make the material UI user-friendly and intuitive by implementing a custom interface so that users can easily change parameters and receive immediate feedback on terrain surfaces.

TerraFormer is a product of of 2 years of development for a team of 3 including artists and programmers to pass thousands of tips, tricks, hints, bugs, glitches, errors and... to be in your hands and still improving.

🌟Have any ideas or feature requests, then share with us on our 1500+ members community here: https://discord.gg/QgPpNpE

FEATURES

⚡ Performance: TerraFormer supports Instanced Drawing for all shaders to greatly improve terrain rendering performance by taking most of rendering fully on GPU which lowers drawcalls significantly and also brings so much better visuals for terrain shadows and per-pixel normalmaps

⚡ Color Tint: Each terrain layer can have its color tint blended with its albedo texture for color controls on surface

⚡ Tessellation (Available in HDRP Tessellated version): GPU Tessellation which adds another dimension to layers and makes the surface being extruded in 3D via depth data stored in maskmap’s blue channel which comes with plenty of performance controls divided for each terrain layer exclusively

⚡ Ambient Occlusion: Controls AO intensity for each terrain layer separately

⚡ Snow: Fully PBR Snow rendering on surface distributed by GPU based on slope, height, normals, tessellation, smoothness, AO, color and procedural noise

⚡ Puddles: GPU based photorealistic puddles which automatically scatters puddles’ regions based on terrain slope and height plus terrain layers’ heightmap & normalmap data which makes your scenes shiny and beautiful as nature does in real life

⚡ Wetness: Makes your terrain surface look wet if the weather state is not dry and comes with Rain settings to add ripples on surface with various options to control

⚡ Tiling Remover: Advanced hex-based tiling remover algorithm to remove repetitive tiling artifacts for seamless textures which automatically adopts itself with layers’ heightmap & normalmap data even if the surface is GPU tessellated which transforms the rendering of textures so organic

⚡ Colormap Blending: Blends satellite image or colormap with terrain layers at given distance to bring the overall look of the real-world area added to scene visuals

⚡ Heightmap Blending: Uses an advanced technique to make the layers’ blending and transitions more organic and realistic via 3D shapes and depth data stored in maskmap’s blue channel as heightmap

⚡ Procedural Texturing (Splatmapping): Proprietary feature provided by TERRA team which greatly enhances splatmapping and layer’s blending utilizing pixel space calculations on GPU to scatter and blend layers in an organic manner via procedural noise functions

⚡ Terrain Holes: Compatible with Unity terrain's hole system to create tunnels and caves in your scene

⚡ Unity Terrain Layer Assets: TerraFormer is fully PBR and can control Normalmap Strength, Metallic, AO, Height & Smoothness along with Tiling Size & Offset for each layer directly via its terrain layer asset linked with terrain(s) in standard terrain creation protocols

All shader features can be enabled/disabled in a modular form on material and there are tooltips for all of the parameters to understand their functionalities.

🌟 Please open the ReadMe file in package after importing to get more information about performance tips and known limitations.