A different perspective on Unity development.!

I need dense foliage because I like dense foliage and I want it in my game. It's simple.

 

So, back to the GPU Instancing thingy:
https://docs.unity3d.com/540/Documentation/Manual/GPUInstancing.html
It looks to be fairly simple, even for custom shaders. It requires a bit more steps if you want some properties to be set differently otherwise your instances will all look the same.
[Edit] Suddenly, I want instancing everywhere! Pretty sure I'll blow up my GPU...

 

Yeah and you get a list version where you just feed it a list if you know it won't need to be culled, which is sort of necessary in some cases, maybe like grass or local stuff.

 

You could do it clever with cliffs , big rocks , big trees or any big alien meshes plants to help culling.
Or like some games uses less grass density and more plain meshes like small rocks.
You don't need to follow medieval open world games conventions or mmos with vast horizons, you can go Follout 4 with less density grass or BattleFront alternative worlds.


Or go custom

- Grass/debris goals
Distribute procedurally because
... instances take a lot of memory
... painting takes a lot of time
Match terrain material
Make it look diverse
Allow for masking out
Make it fast CPU or GPU?

- Pigment map

- Vegetation generator
Offline tool, not limited to grass and debris
Can populate the whole level or chosen contiguous areas
Simulates water accumulation and light distribution

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020197/Landscape-Creation-and-Rendering-in

 

Been messing around with a large terrain in Unity 5.3.4f and errr what is going on?? (ignore the background base bitmap stuff)..

 

Looks like shadowmapping glitch to me.
Unity has interesting way of rendering directional light shadows. It launches 2 or 3 spotlights at different distances, computes shadows from them, then merge them all together to create screenspace texture with shadows.

I'd guess the point where you see black ink spilled on screen is where one of the lower reslution shadowmaps ends.

 

True, they are more active on CryCommunity on Slack.

 

True but deferred isn't working on mobile yet and in forward it is performing better.

 

Cool site! But I'm looking for one with highres photos, like ~4k. Do you have any recommendations? I found some good images on the earthporn subreddit. Alsways looking for more good references.

 

You can feel free to email me and ask me just how I actually make games in Unity. As for your comment about dense forests. In particular I need dense forests because that is what North Carolina is. A semi tropical rainforest that with the exception of carved our roadways, farmland, electric powerline cuts and game trails is close to impassable without a machete. Why do I need to copy that? Because the games currently on the front burner is for a real world franchise based in a real world location that is in real world North Carolina. It also limits the gameplay to the roads by providing a natural barrier wall so I can forego adding a giant landscape of +100 terrains all decorated with the same density as roadside decoration (7x7km at 0.5km per terrain chunk). As for other peoples games that require such. Think of the dense forests as movie sets. It would not be suitable to create a game based in a world of magickal forests without a dense forest and foilage. It can actually make the gameplay more mysterious as to where you are heading due to the occlusion of distance of line of sight.

 

Sooo I did my own tests here! First I added 10k trees on an empty terrain in Unity, and FPS was around 2

But then I dropped it to 3k trees, and frames were still poor. So I started tweaking:



At first it wasn't that good, so I lowered the LOD levels for the trees (2), and there was a huge improvement. Then I lowered it more (3), added grass (4) and exp.quad fog (5).

No, it's not 11 million trees, but Unity doesn't have automatic LOD adjustements or culling, it all has to be done by hand. Can it place 11 million trees into one scene without crashing? I don't think so. But you still can make a scenery with very dense vegetation, if you take the time to tweak and create some specialized systems.

"Oh, but CE does that out of the box!" and that's all it does.

 

Nope it's not all it does. But it's where you'll spend most of your development time trying to tweak instead of making the game if you shoot for quality.

 

Well, a couple of things.. What hardware are you running? Secondly what was the framerate before and after the profiler? As the profiler adds massive overhead.

 

Well profiler adds massive scripting overhead mostly, if we are talking about rendering, not so much...

 

That is my experience too and why I have went the route of simple obj mesh environment rather than Unity terrains. The folk making dual Titan terrains heavily optimized and act like they did it in 30 minutes on their mobile I'm onto you.

 

What would you say the difference in fps when using mesh vs Unity terrains? I have the TerrainToMesh shader which does this automatically and I am thinking of getting the MegaScatter plugin for tree and vegeation, rock and detail scattering The Terrain to Mesh plugin allows me to export the splat maps and tree and detail maps as well. Be nice to just reapply these and scatter the trees etc as I spent alot of time with satellite images to get ground, versus forest versus rocky versus dirt/soil.

 

Tried that too and just converting a terrain to an obj straight up doesn't save much. Getting rid of wind zones, one directional light, and no shadows are the biggest helps. So you'd bake the shadows in the textures when you make the game but at the densities you mention you want your vegetation at elsewhere in the forum I think you can skip baking shadows and it wont be so obvious.

Technically what I haven't tried yet was to turn off shadows for everything but what your players would notice - well that's not quite true - I've turned off all shadows & reduced the lights to one 'sun' and it does wonders, but I've never picked & choose which shadows to turn on & off related to what the player will most likely notice. Most people making games are going for a dark, shadowy urban environment with a lot of point lights but that is not the environment you have in your game.

In your case you'd have the motorcycles can cast shadows and the asphalt of the roads can receive shadows. Humans and animals can cast shadows if you even have them visible in your game. I think I would skip trees and signs casting shadows. For any humans I'd use UMA. They are optimized good already for Unity & look good although you might retexture to make them unique that are good as is.

For your game you need to artificially limit the beginning and end of the race with those race event flags at the beginning and end of the course and maybe introduce police road blocks at the beginning and end. Maybe there are businesses with parking lots at the beginning and end of the course you can use to naturally limit the scope of terrain that can be accessed. Introduce briars and barbwire in places were the density of the trees isn't enough alone to keep them on the track. The terrain you can make the exactness of the topography resolution less exact. I still wouldn't expect but 25 - 35 FPS once you optimize but that is sufficient. I think you said your course is 7km squared.

 

@hippocoder it added 25 ms of GPU overhead when I tried it..

@goat again a bit of perspective about hardware, if you're running the equivalent of an intel GPU then it's kind of expected.. Frame rates are irrelevant without some good ol' hardware reporting..

 

Thanks. Yah, I've noticed I can completely ignore FPS if it's above 20 FPS which is nice because it almost always is.

 

Still, what GPU do you have? Oh and heightmap resolution would be interesting too..

 

Yeah the profiler isn't adding 25ms. It probably cost 25ms due to vsync or other factors like fill rate.

 

Well why do I only loose 25ms when I turn the profiler on? Why is the bandwidth added to deferred lighting pass? Not sure I quite follow you.

If I stop the profiler and use stats only, it happily goes along at 60FPS 15msec (and the reason it is 15 msec is due to vsync).

 

My PC don't count but it's a Intel HD Graphics 3000 and my recent upgrade from 8GB RAM to 16GB RAM made it go from marginal to acceptable. Before it burnt up I had an Intel HD Graphics with 4 GB RAM which worked fine for most things too.

The CPU/GPUs the games I'm making are targeting are the HW in an Acer Iconia 8' (Intel HD Graphics @ 1920x1080 with some sort of Intel Atom) and Androids tablets of Android 4.4 or later (those would be mostly dual core ARMs with quad core ARM GPUs) at FHD so these are not shabby in the least but certainly not Titans or dual GTX 970s that many people have on their desk top.

24 FPS is the cutoff I think that movie makers with real analogue film use so 24 FPS or higher sounds comfortable to me.

 

FX-8120 @ 3.6/4.0 GHz, Radeon 7970 stock, 8GB ram

I was more interested in the differences, so the profiler wouldn't change the conclusion. But I guess I did the wrong tests here hehehe

What I wanted to see was if Unity could deliver games as dense in vegetation as CE by implementing enough optimizations. As @goat said, realtime shadows are the most expensive part, and disabling them has always given a huge performance bonus. I believe CE already expects that kind of scene, so they already optimized shadows and lightmaps to be good looking and good performing. I also believe they wouldn't be as good in some other scenarios, as the lighting requirements would be completely different.

 

Are there any features for using LODs for shadowcasters in Unity? Might that be a good optimization? Googling I only came up with this:
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/427922/various-shadows-quality-basing-on-distance.html

 

Umbra is supposed to occlude shadow casters when baked.

@salgado18

Thanks for that, very interesting as you should be able to run our game on at least medium / high settings (min specs is a GTX470 @ 60FPS). I remember a long time ago, I did have it running at least 50FPS on high / ultra settings on our base platform in Unity.

It did require far more optimisation than simply dumping tree's in a scene, I'd never just smash in thousands of foliage anyway..

You'd be right, CE can run full out and still be better performance wise than Unity.. Although I'm not sure how much that matters as Unity is acceptable. When I was using CE years back, I was running a radeon 6870 and still had 60FPS on max settings in a highly dense scene.

After all the testing I've done, UE is flat out unacceptable.. Even with <2K worth of grass I'm struggling to get 40 FPS on a 390X. That's just ridiculous..!

 

I don't use UE4, but I've seen in the release notes that they've done a lot of performance work in 4.12.

 

Have you talked to the guys working on ARK? I'd imagine they have run into the same issues.

 

Make a nex test scene with a dense forest (grass, trees, rocks) with 4.12 and see the difference. They improved a bunch since 4.5.

 

Umbra is also a completely inaccessible black box. You don't know what it does, when and how. So you can't even guarantee that it will occlude shadow casters.

 

No, don't. Really, if CE fits all the requirements for your project and you can use it, just use it an be done with it. No other engine will beat it in dense vegetation, period. No use trying to get water from rocks

 

Yeah I'm using 4.12..

@Martin_H If you know how to get in touch with them, I'd love to have a chat.

It's not necessarily being able to get it run well, It's the trade off's I'm having to make to get it that point. Below shows a basic test scene running at + 70 FPS.. Issue being I could make it run faster / scale better in Unity without half the tradeoffs and it'd look 10X better for it. Yeah there is some heavy editor overhead to take into account too, but usually it's within 5 - 10 FPS.!

You can make UE look gorgeous at the top tier, it's the scalability ultimatley. It's not even that dense ..!

I mean at this point I have tried nearly everything, I've scaled all the textures back to 256.. I disabled SSS, I removed all shadows / disabled post processing / messed around with all the engine scalability settings and the ONLY thing that makes a decent difference is setting the "resolution scale".. Which pretty much means I'm going to downsample the amount of pixels displayed.. Which again shows that it's an inherent issue with the renderer.

 

Just to note I've been pratting about with the renderer for the last week or so..

Yes ladies and gents, you read it right 51.1K instances of grass..! Not like I'd ever do that in game, but full screen it's 60FPS!.. Having some rather odd issues with lighting, but still a step in the right direction and all that.

 

No clue, sorry. I'd just look on their website for a job application related email address (or something else with high likelyhood of being actually read), state your business, link to something that convinces them that you could potentially help each other, and give it a shot. Worst case you don't get a reply.

Total shot in the dark, but: are there any third party performance analytics tools that can tell you better what exactly takes how long? Nvidia Nsight maybe? I have never used it though.
https://developer.nvidia.com/performance-analysis-tools

 

I'd love to make a beach scene similar to that.

 

I've also been messing around with grass and foliage. I believe that around ~5.2 they did some really significant optimization to terrain grass. I'm getting about 35-40 fps here, but I'm also running a ton of post, animated skybox, physics, ai, ik, navigation, shadows, deferred, etc. This is on about a cheap low end laptop with integrated graphics.

Despite the fog, the foliage visibility is around 100m - and the ground cover is very dense. There are millions of grass instances on the terrain.

I see weird spikes, like the 4ms culling spike and the like, which, out of combat, can drop me to 25-30fps.

In combat, with full on particles, effects, physics, etc - I've had drops to below 20fps which is very concerning. I need to work on my post stack and the skybox as these account for most of my overhead.

 

Looking good sir. I have been creating custom local trees with ST and prepping detail grass swatches and some bushes and woody shrubs all day. I will get around to adding them in the next few days and report back performance on my basic 2012 iMac.

 

Just a friendly note ... Huge amounts of grass absolutely hammer the terrain editing engine.

Also worth noting, grass absolutely needs to be placed procedurally. The way that the engine works, it's incredibly easy to place grass inefficiently (multiple clumps on the same spot from different layers, etc).

When doing grass, especially multi layered grass, you really need to not use manual tools or you're absolutely going to produce waste (from small waste to huge amounts of it).

Finally, there are also potentially big problems when dealing with lower detail resolution in forward, as shadow boundaries can be miscalculated producing awful shadow artifacts. This isn't present in deferred since it's per pixel - but deferred doesn't offer a lot in out door scenes.

 

Did you try this approach?
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/be...s-runs-as-fast-and-looks-just-as-good.339792/

 

There's no way that approach will near the same performance. I'm not using billboard grass, and each grass patch is a single quad I believe. The optimizations the terrain engine does under the hood is significant.

The problem comes down to the amount of data involved.

Let's say you have 12 grass layers. You're using a higher detail resolution. Let's say your detail resolution is 2028x2048.

Your actual detail layer data is 2028 x 2028 x 12, so the detail data alone here is represented by 603,979,776 ints.

There are things like delay LOD on terrain write and stuff that can ease some of the processing, but you begin to deal with absolutely immense amounts of data. If you're applying height changes at some point it's gotta validate the changes which means at least touching giant amounts of data.

Also worth noting, I am not shooting for high fidelity grass, I'm shooting for unholy quantities of it instead. In general, with nature stuff I think that quantity and density is more important than quality and fidelity. I would much rather use low poly legacy trees than speedtree for example and just plant somewhere close to 100,000 (although shader problems will prevent this for me).

 

Some details about how grass works. It's worth noting that some of this could be wrong, I'm inferring and guessing on a lot of it. If someone more knowledgeable wants to correct anything here, that'd be great.

Basics:
Grass is essentially represented in the terrain engine as int[ LayerCount ] [ DetailWidth, DetailHeight ]. One of the things that makes grass difficult to work with is that it deals with int values for each 'pixel' of the detail map. The value at each pixel will roughly represent the number of grass quads that get drawn at the location.

The various terrain maps will be interpolated and blended when rendering out the actual terrain. For the sake of simplicity we assume that every map is the same resolution and each pixel represents a meter.

The Stock Editor:
The stock grass editor will paint grass quantities between 0 and 16 per meter (you'll notice that 'strength' increases in 1/16 steps). In the many cases you will want less than 1 grass quad per meter.

This is very dense grass for a game. I would estimate this at around 2GPM

This is what a solid area with 2GPM looks like:


So obviously quite dense. Here's a single square with 2 GPM.


At 16 - the inspector max...



This is beyond dense. I've never seen a commercial game with anything remotely like that. But...we can go deeper...


Getting Silly With It

At 128 GPM you're dealing with something else entirely.

This is one meter filled with grass. At some point the engine probably starts to cap the number of quads - but honestly I donno what that point is. Visually you really can't tell past here even when completely vertical.

In general, for most games that I've seen, including AAA, the densest grass is usually around 1.5GPM average with high points at 3 and low at 0.

This is also part of the thing that makes dealing with Unity grass kind of annoying. If any detail map pixel has an aggregate grass count over 3, you're really wasting performance. Often, even when blending many grass layers, you will want between 0 and 1 grass quad per meter. So you really want to scatter a few 2 or 3 patch squares across a mostly 0-1 area.

You can also use very dense patches to create makeshift bushes and the like, by doing a single absurd 16+ density grass patch.

Hacking it by hand
I really don't think that you should ever paint grass by hand. Ever. It's not possible to do a good job given the grass interface and the steps if you are using multiple grass layers. There's no way to 'normalize' the detail layers, so you end up making certain areas denser than needed.

If you must, then you should almost always set the grass brush to 1/16 when painting grass. A second or even third layer can be painted in again, with 1/16 density. If you want a 1.5 gpm area, you can gently paint over an area with 2/16 density.

But really, the terrain painter is not remotely ideal for this task if you want to blend different grasses without over painting and drawing extra patches that make little to no visual difference.

Deferred:
Grass resolution per patch scales the number of grass patches that get rendered in a draw call. I assume that the forward shadow problem is because too many grasses are getting batched together.

If you're using deferred, then I don't think this really matters (I could be mistaken though), but since deferred runs per pixel shadows, the shadows will be correct regardless. So you can increase the amount of grass per pass here. Honestly though I'm not really certain how this works or what other effects it has, so I'm gonna be running some tests with this value cranked to max and see if there's any weirdness.

Different Resolutions and Grass Sizes
Finally, all of the numbers above are when dealing with roughly 1x1 meter detail resolutions and grass width that averages 1.5m. The exact numbers you will really want to use will depend on the ratios between the resolutions and sizes.

So if your grass resolution is double the size of the terrain then you have 4 detail pixels per meter, you generally want less grass per pixel. Likewise, smaller grass width means you may need denser grasses to cover an area.

For instance, if you want super small, very low grass, you really might need 8+ grass patches per meter to have good coverage. But most real games tend to have grasses at around the 1m+ size (I think).

 

Well I've done my own tests, I painted it by hand as opposed to it as @frosted is.. Performance was great 60 FPS (vsync) across the board no issues on both my 390X and min spec GTX 470 (full settings).. Which is awesome..! I tried 15+K grass meshes and all sorts and it was hard to get it under 60 FPS.

Again opposed to what @frosted said, I had the same shadowmap issues whether in deferred or forward.. Although I just offset it via IBL until it wasn't noticeable.!

The issues, ok firstly I'd like to say that Enlighten isn't any better than when I last tried it.. Firstly it takes forever and I've only got a 9 tile here.. When I added in the village + terrain it just broke, In UE with lightmass I was baking 200+ tiles with foliage with 100 bounces in under 4 hours! The HDR / IBL being attached to it sucks as well, because you have no choice but to wait..

Secondly, some rather odd bugs.. Directional lights just stopped shadowmapping for no apparent reason, global fog doesn't work on the AMD card for whatever reason and the editor is grinding with a 9 tile and a small villiage which isn't exactly awesome.!

Although apart from that, it's been cool.!

 

What was the shadow map problem? The 'resolution per patch'/deferred problem is that if you have complex shadows like tree leaves and stuff that moves, the shadows will pop in and out making a very weird shadow flickering as the shadows move between patch boundaries.

Also, I'm not a super expert. I decided to really dig in today and those were my observations on how the grass engine works. I could certainly be wrong about any part of it!

Also, what was your AMD/Global Fog problem? I've dealt with a lot of global fog issues on amd.

 

It doesn't actually seem to work at all, yes I turned it on in lighting and added the post effect to the camera.. Something I need to look into.

Have any tips let me know, save me some time.

 

That one I've never seen, but there are definitely some weird things that can come into play depending on effect ordering. If something blows out out depth before the fog gets there, that can obviously be a big problem. But I think that would be a cross platform problem.

 

My inspiration for what foliage shadows should look is from Dead Island. It was done using Unreal. It looks very good. The game handled real-time shadows from moving foliage perfectly.
(BTW the game was released 6 years ago. So it's good example of what was possible to do 6 years ago)

 

You have any links to particularly good shots of their grass? I did a few searches and didn't see anything close to witcher 3. Most of their grass is texture painted, they have very pretty shrubs, but I didn't see much grass.

Examples I saw had very little grass, mostly shrubs and small plants - under spoiler:

Spoiler

The shrubs really look great through, and the textures they use are lush and detailed. But from the shots I found, their actual grass treatment is not very good, nowhere near witcher 3. It still looks great because of the dense shrubbery and detailed textures.

 

Dead Island 1 was not using Unreal. Afaik Dead Island 2 (the canceled one) was supposed to be made with a modified Unreal Engine 3. Dead Island 1 uses Chrome Engine 5 according to Wikipedia.


Edit: Those are possibly from different iterations, including the new remaster:

http://images.eurogamer.net/2013/articles//a/1/5/7/5/6/0/8/PC_1080p_001.bmp.jpg

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Q4wXobn1...ptide-Definitive-Edition_20160530192638-1.jpg



This might be more interesting:
http://www.geforce.co.uk/whats-new/guides/dying-light-graphics-and-performance-guide
It has a section on different grass densitiy settings and the performance impact on FPS in Dying Light.

 

I'm not sure about the grass.I just watched one playthrough video here:

There's this video which shows more grass:

I searched other videos and I don't see alot of grass, but usually the grass is covered up by some shadow from a bush or tree.
@Martin_H
Yeah, you're right. They kept switching developers which probably kept driving the need to switch engines. Maybe Techland did not want to hand over their home-grown engine as part of the transfer of work to another developer?

 

I sure do miss them days with grass was just a flat texture... F*** overgrown long grass everywhere

I mean its not even realistic when you step on it.. it doesn't flatten.. immersion destroyed guys, I just lost interest in your tripple AAA game I can forgive indie's for being careless with these minor details.

Fyi anyone remember Rust (Unity only flagship lagfest fps game) saying all the grass doesn't effect the performance.. herpa derp, along with their forum trolls beating down any users asking for the old command lines to tone down all the grass.. I notice this week its .. we've made new terrain gen without all this S***ting clutter of grass gone.. and you get better performance. Well jeez no sht.