[Unity Tutorial] Atlas Unity Terrain Editor - How to Use Splatmapping

Let's look at everything you need to know about splatmapping in Atlas Unity Terrain Editor.

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00:00 Splatmapping in Atlas
Atlas would not be complete without splatmap control.

First, we'll explain a bit on how splatmapping works in Atlas and where the splatmaps come from.

If we look at a stamp and select the stamp asset, we can see that it consists of a few textures.

The Splat 1 and Splat 2 textures hold the splatmap information.
You can select them and see what they look like.

Each Splat texture contains four channels, each channel can be used to build our final splatmap with.

The stamps provided with Atlas come with channels for erosion, rock variation, texture variation and slope.

When you create your own stamps, you can include anything you want in those channels.

This also means that the control a stamp provides depends on how it's made and what is available in its textures.

00:55 Altering splatmaps
With this out of the way, let's take one of our stamp prefabs and alter its splatmap.

Since we will be editing our terrain, enable the preview volume by clicking on the edit button, then remove your current stamps in the scene and place the b_hill_03 stamp from the stamps folder.

Each stamp can have multiple splatmap rules and they are located in the stamp layer section.  
For now, clear the list so that there are 0 elements.

Now, let's build our own rules from scratch.

Add an element to the list and set the input value to none.

Now, set the target value to terrain layer 3.
This is the soil layer we configured earlier.
As you can see, the whole stamp is now covered in soil.


Let's add another element to the list, set the input value to flow quaternary, set the target to terrain layer 4 which is our secondary soil layer.

01:56 Tweaking the Splat Layers
We can see the flow on it, but let's tweak the layer to get a better result.
Click the eye icon to see what the flow map looks like.
Red indicates where the terrain layer will be drawn.

For now, reduce the offset slider a bit and increase the power slider to get a more sharper flow going.

Click the eye icon once more to see the result.

You can tweak further until you are happy with this layer.

02:33 Splatmapping Tips
You can add as many layers as you need and they render from top to bottom overriding each other.

The best results are obtained with a fair amount of layers.  
Three or four layers should be fine, it's easy to overdo this so keep this in mind as you paint your terrain.

It's best to leave the input value on none for the first layer.
This ensures splamaps from below don't leak through.

02:56 What's next?
That's it for splatmapping.

In the next tutorial, we'll discuss structuring our scene and dealing with a bunch of stamps all at once.