Black Textures when applying Biomes

[Magijedi]

I'm having several issues I could use some help on:

1. When applying Biomes, such as Alpine & Synty (default & fantasy kingdom), I get a lot of black texturing. I've tried deleting & reimporting Gaia/Gena/Fantasy Kingdom spawner and it still happens. It's not all textures - typically mountain/mud stuff on steep inclines. 

2. Is there a way to get a color map/vertex shading looking like the World Designer preview? Another way of putting it, I want results similar to Polaris without relying on textures to simulate the polygonal look. 

3. A lot of the vegetation in your Biome packs doesn't seem to support Flora (the checkbox doesn't appear). Only grass seems compatible out of the box. Am I missing something here? 

Thanks for any help anyone can offer!

[Bryan]

1. This could happen due to a few reasons: 
- To many textures on a single terrain (which is typically the cause) 
- Materials and textures are not updated to the correct pipeline. 

So I would make sure your within the texture limit depending on the render pipeline that you are using. 

2. This I am not sure on I will ask Peter about this. 

3. Currently it support grass, we are looking into supporting more like trees etc. 
This has been in the works but we do not have a release date as of yet. 
Flora was made to support grass in HDRP due to Unity not being able to support grass in hdrp. 

[Peter]

@Magijedi

Regarding 2.: Yes, there is something built in in Gaia for that - It is in the terrain mesh exporter, while converting the terrain to a mesh it can be transformed in such way that it uses a vertex color shader which has this typical "low poly" look. You can see it in action at the end of this video around 31:55:

Note that the terrain mesh exporter has multiple settings that control the export results, you might find the mesh resolution and simplification settings interesting:



If you export at a rather high resoulution and quality, you will get a rather orderly mesh, the less resolution / quality the more "raw" it gets.

[Magijedi]

On 2/1/2022 at 3:43 PM, Bryan said:

1. This could happen due to a few reasons: 
- To many textures on a single terrain (which is typically the cause) 
- Materials and textures are not updated to the correct pipeline. 

Thank you very much for the detailed reply you've both provided!

Regarding issue #1, I agree it seems to be texture overlap related. Is there a recommended terrain configuration that should work with your built-in biomes "out of the box"? I'm still prototyping the outdoor area and was hoping for a turn-key solution to texturing the terrain at this phase. 

 

EDIT: Just wanted to say the low poly mesh conversion worked excellently! 

Edited February 3, 2022 by Magijedi

[Bryan]

You should only have up to 8 textures per biome. 
Any more textures on the terrain will cause the terrain to go black. 
 

[Magijedi]

I hate to keep bringing this up, but I'm concerned that my issue might not be clear on this matter. 

I've tested with several of your biomes you include, either by default or as part of a pack. While several are giving me this issue (not all - "Synty Studios (Low Poly) Biome" works fine, for instance), the one I'm particularly interested in troubleshooting is the "Synty Fantasy Biome", which when viewing the "Synty Fantasy-Texture Spawner" object, the "Spawner" component shows 5 textures. 

Is it expected behavior for it to go black when using it by default? If so, that's a bit odd and I would respectfully suggest tweaking it to avoid this happening on new installs. 

If the answer is no, then is there any way to reset it back to defaults in case I messed it up somehow? I've already tried reimporting both the Gaia Pro & the Fantasy Kingdom Spawner Packs, which made no difference. And this test has been repeated on brand new Scenes with brand new Gaia World Designer-generated terrains and associated tools.

Thank you.

[Peter]

22 hours ago, Magijedi said:

Is it expected behavior for it to go black when using it by default? If so, that's a bit odd and I would respectfully suggest tweaking it to avoid this happening on new installs. 

No, it is definitely not. The terrain just should stay as it is. Note that for the number of textures on the terrain it would not be relevant how many textures are set up in the spawner, but rather how many are on the terrain object - if there were other textures remaining from previous spawns on the terrain, and the newly brought in texture spawner would then exceed the maximum number of textures on the terrain, you might get a black terrain as result.

 

23 hours ago, Magijedi said:

If the answer is no, then is there any way to reset it back to defaults in case I messed it up somehow? I've already tried reimporting both the Gaia Pro & the Fantasy Kingdom Spawner Packs, which made no difference. And this test has been repeated on brand new Scenes with brand new Gaia World Designer-generated terrains and associated tools.

Could you please provide a screenshot from the issue? Which Rendering Pipeline are you using, and are you using any additional terrain shader asset?

[Magijedi]

2nd EDIT:

I removed URP from the project, then reinstalled URP, and that seems to have worked. Of course, Unity being Unity that screwed up my custom Shader Graph shaders, and caused some other issues, which it seems the only fix is to open each shader graph individually and re-save it but whatever. 

On a related note, I think I know what might've helped cause this. In 2021 the "Upgrade Materials to URP" functionality is paired with other converters, which since I wasn't familiar with 2021 when I started the project, I ran all the converters and some of them froze Unity and eventually crashed it. That might've contributed to this issue. I'd recommend anyone moving to 2021 and bringing over older shaders be careful to only select the "Material Upgrade" option if you have to do a conversion, as the other ones seem prone to failure/issues. 

Anyway, sorry for the long post, but a HUGE thanks to PW staff for all the help. 

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EDIT: I've started a new project using the same Unity version/SRP and it seems to be working (though my first two generated terrains were totally white for some reason. A new scene worked, though).

Leaving the below so I can update if/when I nail down the cause and/or anyone else runs into the issue. My apologies for taking up your time. 

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Using: Unity 2021.2.9f1 on URP 12.1.4. 

Screenshot taken with Alpine Meadow:

 

Thanks!

[Josh]

On 2/13/2022 at 10:12 PM, Magijedi said:

EDIT: I've started a new project using the same Unity version/SRP and it seems to be working (though my first two generated terrains were totally white for some reason. A new scene worked, though).

Leaving the below so I can update if/when I nail down the cause and/or anyone else runs into the issue. My apologies for taking up your time.

Normally black texturing on the terrain means you have exceeded the 8 texture limit on the unity terrain. Check your terrain layers and make sure you don't have anymore than 8 layers. If there are more just be sure to remove these extra layers.

 

If not then also note that in Unity latest updates from 2021.2.8+ they updated the graphics renderer and has caused quite a few issues in HDRP and URP. But hopefully it is the first reson.

[Magijedi]

FINAL EDIT: Rebuilding the project (ie: creating a new project and reinstalling all the unity tools and asset store assets we use from scratch) fixed it, so I strongly suspect something went awry with the conversion I mentioned in my prior post. Hope this helps someone in the future. Thanks again to PW staff for their help. 

 

As I mentioned before, definitely not a texture layer issue. I've manually checked and actively use the "Remove Resources" feature to "clean" the terrains before trying to reapply the textures via spawner.

Definitely something with Unity. Each time I reopen the project, the black texturing comes back, and the only fix I've found is to Remove URP, then add it back in, and for the duration of that session it'll work. However, this is all on the original project I'd been working in (which, keep in mind, was pretty much a fresh project a few weeks back). I'm about to try and rebuild the project from scratch (again) and try to reopen/reapply textures with each install/import in the hopes of identifying where the failure happened. 

Just dropping this in here for posterity. No need to offer support unless you guys specifically have any ideas.