6 replies to this topic

[Dropzone73]

I've been creating my first course from lidar data (real course in Finland) and now all the spline tool work (exept hazards) and terrain shaping has been done.

 

So I have gathered trees, grasses, flowers and textures to be able to do the planting and texture painting for the course. And now I have faced few challanges when doing this and want to know more about them.

 

Questions:

 

1. Is there some limitation to the amount of textures you can have for the Unity painting tool? I ask, because after 24 textures the painting tool crashes whole Unity every time you try to start painting texture to the terrain? It's good to have your scene saved, because after this happens, you can't get rid of the problem. So, is it the amount of textures or maybe some megabyte limitation which couses this or is it just my problem?

 

2. Then question about 2D grasses and flowers in the planting tool. Does Unity worsen the resolution of grasses and flowers if you have many of them or is it just the question of import settings or something like that? I can do some tweakings to some grasses by selecting "overwrite standalone" and  by selecting 2048 resolution, but many of the grasses look very low res anyway. If you open the 2D picture of the plant in any Windows software they look alright. Do they look ok in the JNPG? I haven't had time to test myself yet? Will do that next.

 

I'm very thankfull for every piece of information you can share with me. I didn't find anything from the forum conserning this, so I had to ask you.

 

[Kablammo11]

1. It could be your PC that shuts down: Every single 2048 sized texture can weigh up to 5 MB - too many of them could cause trouble if your RAM is too small. 24 seems to be a bit excessive, I usually use from 6 to 10 textures (with matching normal maps) per project and also reduce their size to 1024 wherever it is possible. Keep in mind that anything further away from the playing area than 50y is pretty much a blurry clump of colours anyway in the perspective of the golfer in the game.

 

2. There is, I believe, a setting somewhere in the inspector of grass billboards that lets you avoid a forced reduction in resolution over distance. Setting billboards to 2048 resolution is useless, unless they are of that size to begin with - that setting is only for reducing the workload of large resolutions by reducing them. My billboards have sizes of either 512 or 1024. It's very important that the plants within should not be too thin, because thin plants with very fine details very quickly dissolve over distance.

[Dropzone73]

Thanks for answering K11!

I'll just have to rationalize my assets. And maybe better so, because this was starting to feel complicated.

[pingzing]

Hi Mate

 

Yes the problem is too many textures, i had same issues, delete  the unused textures one by one  until you reach that magical number

[Dropzone73]

Hi Mate

 

Yes the problem is too many textures, i had same issues, delete  the unused textures one by one  until you reach that magical number

Jep, that was it.

[DPRoberts]

This may no longer be true in our current Unity but I have always added terrain textures for painting in multiples of "4".

6 textures will be as costly as 8. So, you might as well use 8. The reason is each terrain texture occupies a channel of the "splatmap" which is defined as a "RGBA" containing file.

This mumbo jumbo means when you add a 5th terrain painting texture, a new 4 channel splatmap is generated whether you want all 4 texture panels or not. This is also why K11s choice of 6-10 works. He is knowingly or unknowingly only dealing with 2-3 splatmaps.

I would still try and stay at 8 or less but it seems you have figured it out. This is a much delayed response but thought a clarification might be helpful to some.

[Dropzone73]

I found out that 16 was the limit with my textures. So I was dealing with 4 splatmaps. 5th was too much.

Thanks for information!