Properties in this category allow you to customize scene surfaces globally, meaning changing any property here will affect the entire scene unless the object's materials use a property override.

Enables coverage in materials that use Weatherade shaders. If disabled, then the shaders will act like Unity Standard shadar.

This option enables the ability to edit the automatically generated coverage occlusion mask. Vertex colors are used for regular MeshRenderes, and Terrains use an additional texture-mask. Both can be painted with Total Brush which is included in the package. In BiRP currenty only ⠀R⠀ channel is used. In URP all 4 channels can be utilized, if different snow layers are used.

If this option is enabled, the shader will use an additional set of normals stored in the UV4 channel. This helps eliminate mesh “cracks” when using displacement and improves the coverage on meshes with split normals.

Generate these normals by selecting an object in the scene and clicking the “Average Normals” button in its material UI, or go to the Total Brush window and click the same button there.

Enables stochastic sampling that eliminates visible tiling artifacts. This option has a performance overhead because the texture fetch operation is performed 3 times instead of 1.

Texture which is used to build the snow coverage surface.
It uses a specific channel mapping:

• Normals - ⠀R⠀ ⠀G⠀ - adds pseudo-relief details to the snow.
• Height - ⠀B⠀ - used for the displacement feature and as a snow surface mask on the coverage transitions, to make them more organic.
• Smoothness - ⠀A⠀ - used for the snow surface glossiness. Can be also reused for the Sparkle effect.

The uniform tiling value of the Coverage Texture.

Color of the coverage.

Coverage smoothness range. Remaps the Coverage Texture alpha channel, which is used as smoothness.

Bumpiness of the coverage. The ⠀R⠀ and ⠀G⠀ channels of the Coverage Texture are used to construct normals.

Amount of the сoverage applied to the surface.

Blend hardness between the triplanar projections.

Masks the base surface emission effect by the coverage.

Forces to overlay coverage normals over the base surface normals even when Displacement is disabled. This value is a linear interpolation between the base normal map and the coverage normal map.

Detail map can help to improve the snow surface details close to the camera.

Texture used for the detail mapping. Channel mapping used:

• Normals - ⠀R⠀ ⠀G⠀ - adds additional micro-relief details to the snow.
• Smoothness - ⠀B⠀ - used for the snow surface glossiness and Color Enhance.

Tiling of the Detail Texture.

Remap the Detail Texture ⠀B⠀ channel, which is used for the smoothness/Color Enhance.

Micro-relief scale of the details.

The distance in units where the details will fade out.

Area mask settings allow you to control how the coverage occlusion will look. All parameters here are related to each other.

Range of the coverage mask values. A value of 1 means the transitions between the coverage and base surfaces are as soft and wide as possible.

The bias of the coverage area.
This property is needed for two things:

• Fix the coverage banding and Z-clipping artifacts
• Shrink/expand the coverage occlusion mask in conjunction with the Mask Range.

Internally it works similar to the shadow bias property on the Unity light sources.

Reducing coverage leaks at the cost of increasing mask hardness.

The linear offset from the original direction of the coverage instance. Values below 0 will create a stronger direction-dependent coverage mask, and values greater 0 can help add more coverage on the opposite side of the direction of the coverage instance. Internaly it just adds this value to the coverage direction mask.

On the examples below the coverage instance transform direction is set straight down:

Shrink/expand the coverage direction mask gradient. You can make the direction mask more hard lowering the range.

Improves the appearance of a surface when using the Displacement feature by subdividing the mesh triangles.

Weatherade implements the Edge Length tessellation method with some specific additions, that improves performance:

• View frustum culling (useful for large meshes such as terrain)
• Mask tessellation by snowdrift slopes
• Data-driven tessellation factor (works with Traces feature)

Example of the data-driven tessellation in action:

Maximum screen-space length of the edge. Edges longer than this value will be subdivided.

Multiplier for the overall snow surface tessellation.

Range of mask that used to increase the tessellation factor on snowdrift slopes.

Maximum distance from camera's clip planes on which tessellation should not be applied.
Weatherade tessellation uses Frustum Culling to improve performance on large meshes by appling tessellation only for visible triangles. When Displacement is used you should increase this value to compensate the displacement and prevent mesh clipping. The higher the Coverage Displacement value, the larger this value should be. This can be especially noticable on a terrain mesh.

This feature allows you to raise the vertices of the mesh by the coverage mask, creating realistic snowdrifts.

The contrast of the coverage height, when using the Displacement feature. For this purpose, the ⠀B⠀ channel of the Coverage Texture is used.

Defines the height map MIP level. Use higher values to get rid of noisy displacement.

The amount of displacement added to the mesh verices. It depends on the Coverage Texture ⠀B⠀ channel, as it's used as a height map and multiplied by this value.

Offsets the black point of the coverage mask gradients. This useful to prevent unnecessary displacement on some not-covered areas.

See how the snowdrift's displacement starts too early and lifts the base surface when the Offset is too small:

Enables interactive traces on the snow coverage.

If you haven't already added the Trace Mask Generator component, you will be prompted to do so. Click the “Add Now” button.

Blend factor between the base surface and coverage. If set to 0, the base texture will be visible inside the traces.

Multiplier color of the generated traces. You can use it to simulate greater depth or ambient occlusion effects within a trace. If the color is set to white it will have no effect as it is internally multiplied by the coverage color.

Factor of the linear blend between the coverage color and Color.

Range of the trace mask, used for the color Blend. You can shrink this range to get sharper mask.

The normal scale of the generated traces.

Determines whether traces will use the global Detail Texture.

The global texture, that used to add details to the generated traces.

It uses a specific channel mapping:

• Normals - ⠀R⠀ ⠀G⠀
• Height - ⠀B⠀

The uniform tiling of the Detail Texture.

The normal scale of the details.

The intensity of the detail displacement, applied to the generated traces.

Tweaking properties here can help make coverage transitions more organic.

The amount of base surface normal map influence on the coverage transitions blending. Consider this like the well-known height blending technique, but without the need to provide an additional height map, since Weatherade simulates this using a normal map.

Power of the normal map blending. This just raises the faked height map to a math power.

This feature allows you to eliminate the tiling artifacts on terrains by blending between original textures and LOD textures with lower tiling values.

The distance from camera at which the baked LOD texture starts to appear.

The size of the fading gradient for the original/LOD texture. The higher the value, the softer the blend will be.

Sparkle effect adds these little shinny dots on the surface, which improves the snow appearens. SSS (SubSurface Scattering) simulates light penetration into the surface and exiting from different point.

Enables subsurface scattering effect on the snow.

Intensity of the subsurface scattering effect.

Enables sparkle effect on the snow surface.

Optional black and white texture which ⠀R⠀ channel is used as a sparkle effect mask. If no texture is provided, the alpha channel of the main coverage texture can be used.

Amount of snow sparkle effect. This value depends on the Mask texture.

Brightness of the snow sparkle effect.

Maximum draw distance of the sparkle effect. Decrease this value to prevent unwanted noise and artifacts on far distances.

Source for the sparkle mask which will be used in the object local space.

Uniform tiling of the local space mask.

Source for the sparkle mask which will be used in the screen space.

Tiling of the screen-space mask.

Expansion of the highlight mask, that is used to show the sparkle effect only on highlights from the lights sources.

Power of the lightmap mask. Values greater than 0 prevent the Sparkle and SSS effect in dark areas, when baked lighting is used.

Enhance the snow surface color. The Coverage Texture ⠀A⠀ + Detail Texture ⠀B⠀ channels are used as a source.

Brightness of the highlight from the main light.

Remap the SSS mask values. Coverage Texture ⠀A⠀ + Detail Texture ⠀B⠀ channels are used as a source.

Remap the color enhance mask. Coverage Texture ⠀A⠀ + Detail Texture ⠀B⠀ channels are used as a source.