Heathen’s Standard Tri-Planar includes the full Heathen Tri-Planar Essentials shader collection and introduces new and improved ‘Standard’ shaders for materials and terrains. Based on Unity 5’s Standard Shader and using the same shader editor approach a single shader provides the developer with world and object based Tri-Planar projection.
If you not familiar with Tri-planar projection it’s a technique of mapping textures to a mesh that does not require UV maps. On render texture coordinates are calculated by the shader insuring the texture is ‘projected with no stretching or distortion based either on the world normal or the object normal.
For objects this means highly complex models and generic models can be textured with any substance like material and will just work. The statue below is an very complex model available on BlendSwap from (Mikel007 Blendswap.com) and has no UVs yet textures beautifully using the physically based shading on Heathen’s Standard Tri-planar.
When using world projection this also insures that tiled textures always aligned properly as they are always offset to the world normal e.g. position 0,0,0. Terrains also get a big quality improvement over traditional UV based projection, steep cliff faces often avoided on terrains due to texture stretching now blend perfectly with no extra effort. Heathen’s Standard Tri-Planar terrain shader goes a step further and correct for normal map blending insuring blended normal maps are always normalized eliminating the wet or shiny look that occur when blending certain normal maps.
Heathen’s Standard Tri-Planar shader is available on Unity Asset Store now at ( Assetstore.unity3d.com ) and upgrade paths are available from the Tri-Planar starter kits.
