The Visual Engine | Terrain Blanket Module

The Visual Engine is a set of high-quality shaders and tools designed to unify 3rd party assets under the same shader system. Enable high-quality wind motion, interaction, seasons, wetness, subsurface, layers, variation, etc. for all assets with Standard, Universal, or HD Render Pipeline!

○ Overview

The Terrain Blanket module allows you to conform and align big patches of grass or groups of rocks, which would only work for flat surfaces, to the terrain surface and normal direction. The shaders are using the pre-baked pivots to treat each sub-mesh as an individual object, allowing you to use fewer grass objects while covering bigger areas. Or it can simply conform objects like roots to the terrain surface like a 3D mesh decal. 

The Terrain Blanket module supports seamless object-to-terrain blending when the Terrain Shaders module is used!

○ Compatibility

The Terrain Blanket Module supports the following Render Pipelines:

✓ Standard Render Pipeline 2021.3+

✓ Universal Render Pipeline 2021.3+ / 2022.3+ / 6000.0+

✓ HD Render Pipeline 2021.3+ / 2022.3+ / 6000.0+

The Terrain Blanket Module has integration with the following 3rd party tools:

✓ Amplify Shader Editor - Full shader editing support

✓ GPU Instancer - Instanced Indirect support

✓ Nature Renderer - Procedural Instancing support

✓ Instant Renderer - Procedural Instancing support

✓ Vegetation Studio - Instanced Indirect support

✓ Vegetation Studio Pro - Instanced Indirect support

The Terrain Blanket Module supports the following add-ons:

✓ The Visual Engine • Terrain Shaders Module (Terrain Blending)

✓ The Visual Engine • Terrain Elements Module

○ Features

✓ The Visual Engine systems support: All systems

✓ The Visual Engine elements support: All elements

✓ Terrain height conform

✓ Terrain orientation alignment

✓ Terrain layer blending designed to work with the Terrain Shaders Module

✓ Amplify Shader Editor support

✓ Conform and blending demo scenes included

○ Limitations

🞫 Shader Model 4.5+ capable devices are required (Desktop / High-End Mobile)

🞫 Scalable Ambient Obscurance is not supported in Forward Rendering

🞫 Beta and Alpha Unity versions are not officially supported

○ Disclaimers

⚑ The Blanket shaders are designed to conform to the terrain surface, and by their nature, they cannot be used with the Amplify Impostors module! If you are using Nature Renderer, it already aligns the details to the terrain normals by default!

⚑ The Blanket shaders are only designed to work with big grass patches and planar meshes and conforming is only a visual effect, mesh colliders will not be affected and they will not conform to the terrain!