Continuing Map Overhaul part 2 (Patreon)

I got a lot of work done with the new map overhaul. Lots of new optimized textures and models have been implemented and placed into the surrounding new and giant landscape. Let's show off some pictures of how it's turning out so far:

One of the new additions to visuals is an improved terrain shader. Unity's built in terrain shader is very outdated and ugly. It uses a standard linear interpolation between layers and produces the following results:

The image above shows how it blends between 4 layers, grass, dirt, rock, and sand. Everything feels like it just fades away and there are no clear distinctions to where things start and stop. It doesn't look very good. I was going to add masks to add more interesting blending transitions but it requires a lot more textures which can be expensive. When I include normals, color, roughness, and masks, Unity's default terrain material ended up with 16 textures, all which need to be sampled when drawn. This proved to be poor in performance for VR.

And so, I went ahead and wrote my own terrain shader:

Notice how the grass cuts off based on the shape of the texture itself. Everything blends together organically and in tinier patches. To address the 16 texture problem, I packed masks into empty alpha channels. I also limited the terrain to 2 different normals after testing and finding out that that was the optimal amount needed for visuals. All in all it brought me down to 6 textures. Roughness values were computed by just the final color's green value. It was a good approximation. Here's a comparison:

It's great for the grass because it really makes it pop out and contrast on other surfaces which makes it look like it's growing on it.

I'm also working on the giant river that runs through the map. I have not finished the shader for it so I put a placeholder texture as a material:

It will split off into a little puddle for fishing:

So far I've finished roughly 40% of the map. I should finish this in about a week. After that I will see what available assets I have ready to start implementing stuff. If I don't have the chicken model yet then I'll look into the kitchen or chicken logic.

Stay tuned.