Simulation Another walking simulator

Hi folks!
Just another nature walking simulator here.
Do it for myself in my spare time to relax and wander around.
I haven't even come up with a name yet.

Screens:




Video (quality is meh):

 

Gorgeous! Out of curiosity, are you willing to give any info as to what resources you used for the elements of this scene?
Either way, keep up the good work

 

How do you have sky occlusion? Are you using something like occlusion probes, similar to what unity created for the Forest HDRP demo? Also, what render pipeline? Looks very impressive!
Honestly gives me kingdom come deliverance vibes, which is big considering that game has some of the nicest looking vegetation and lighting! This is one the best forest scenes I've seen in a game.

Tell us all the secrets!

 

Glad you like it guys!

Some of grass textures are from "Realistic grass pack" from Unity Asset Store. Few textures from Quixel and CG Textures, the rest are homemade textures and models.

For sky occlusion I made shadow-accumulative volumetric cascades, with 3-component directional data per voxel, it works as custom injection into Built-in RP.

 

Out of curiosity, how did you do the paths? Are they terrain textures painted on a very high resolution splatmap or splines?

Anyway, this looks fantastic, it's one of the best and most natural scenes I've ever seen in Unity!

 

Paths are 2D SDFs produced by shader code. Painted textures was not an option, resolution would be too high indeed.

 

Oh dear, I wanted to make myself something like this and now I see it here in perfection.. I think I still try to do my version, but this looks really beautiful!

 

Would be cool to try this in a demo build or so! Looks fantastic, how did you achieve such quality and so on, wow!

 

Thanks a lot guys, it's very encouraging!
I tried to get better quality by using custom written material shaders, and custom light pass.
If there is anything specific you want to know, I can try to explain better.
I hope that when I finish with the base set of planned features, I'll make a tech-demo build.

 

are you evaluating 2D SDFs in your terrain rendering shader for deciding which texture to sample?
You added a custom light pass to the build-in renderpipeline? Since the Build-in renderpipeline is not that flexible I guess you added some kind of voxel-based light/shadow accumulation to achieve the bright and dark areas within the forrest right? Whatever you did, it looks stunning! Keep up the good work this is simply amazing!

 

Thanks a lot, Kreshi!
Yes, you are right about SDFs, I do exactly that.
Regarding the render pipeline, I decided to use the built-in deferred pipeline because of its performance and feature set.
It is indeed less flexible than URP or HDRP, but it is good enough for command buffer injections.
It could be that I just didn't dig deep enough, but I always had troubles of different kinds with URP and HDRP.
With built-in RP everything "just works" and is "fast."
The voxel-based light and shadow accumulation guess is also right.
I do also use multiple volumes to accumulate light data, so it's a kind of cascading solution to cover a bigger distance (approx. 7 km from the player position), and each volume updates in runtime when player position or sunlight angle deviation reach certain thresholds.

 

Thanks for the explanation!
From a "getting things done" perspective, your approach of choosing the well documented build-in pipeline is absolutely understandable and valid .
Do you use trilinear interpolation for smoothing the voxel data or blur or do you use both?

 

I wonder if adding some life, eg animals, insects would be good, not much just some.

 

Documentation is the key to ease pain, for sure.
Voxel data is sampled in the shader as a full-volume 3D texture with standard trilinear filtering.
Light accumulation is processed for each texel in volume, so there is no need to have light probes since the whole space around is filled with light data.

I was thinking about adding flying insects and flocks of birds. But I'm not sure about other animal types yet.

 

Also, some flowing water/river, there are assets that can simulate a real flowing water/river. Or Rain/weather changes.

 

that is a good idea, but when i saw the video for me it felt like it was alive, now that i'm thinking about idk why was that, maybe the sun effect, the lighting and the wind, in fact i have to say i learn something watching your video

 

Dynamic weather is something I plan to add together with day/night cycle.
But river system is not part of short-term plans. Since world creation happens in runtime, building riverbeds on the fly would be a challenge, I have some ideas in mind but it would need more research.

Thank you, impheris, that's nice to hear!

 

Decided to replace permanent 2D UI compass with an equipable3D compass.

 

Amazing job!, definitely would love to see some tech-details with all resources you were using to learn this

 

That's brilliant!

 

This is absolutely beautiful. I think it might be the best near/mid-field landscape I've seen in any game. The ambient lighting/occlusion solution you've developed really sells it. Keep going!

 

superb, splendid, also very amazing . . .

it's a 10 / 10 video - game . . . .

 

have to say, this is almost a movie, or could be on also tv . . . .

 

Looks amazing. What is it that you do to have nice forests far away? The distance shadows etc, do you do custom things to make it look so good? Usually distant trees/forests looks pretty bad in Unity but you nailed it.

 

Thank you for your kind words,
it is a custom sprite baking and rendering solution I made for my trees and other landscape objects.
Sprites also have Z-Depth texture component, helps to achieve better-looking SSAO, screen space sun shadows and shadow maps on tree sprites.

 

Wait... are you telling me those guys i put arrows on, are sprites?

 

Yes, they are sprites.

 

WTF! ok whatever you did, your custom things... is awesome

 

Added dynamic day-night cycle and clear-overcast sky system

 

It's beautiful.

 

this is, maybe the best forest i've seen on unit, good work

 

Looks great, congrats.

 

just awesome!

 

Thanks for the support and encouragement, guys!

 

Encouragement!

 

Amazing! Do you have any other socials to follow your work?

 

Thank you!
I do not have any socials to follow, except silly YT channel with one video
What platform would you use for such content?

 

Twitter works best for me, probably posting this on Unity Forums on Reddit might work well too

 

Did some landscape experiments:

 

"So far nothing remarkable."

I'm guessing you have something planned!.

I'd like to see some strange surreal props dotted around this beautiful landscape. And maybe add some moss and vines to them so they look settled.

 

This looks absolutely fantastic. Have you had any considerations of making your tech available for others (whether paid or not)?

In my book, there's not any available demo projects (paid or free) for Unity that pulls off dense forest rendered far into the distance, let alone as beautifully done as this project here. (I wrote a thread about that here.)

I'm working on my own procedural terrain and while I'm happy with having figured out how to procedurally plan paths in the terrain with switchbacks and everything, I'm struggling with the performance of the trees, and with the fact that there's no good proven demo projects to study and use as reference.

Is your terrain manually designed at edit time? And if so, do they rely on that (e.g. for baking any data) or could everything be generated at runtime too?

Edit: Oh, I see you said "Since world creation happens in runtime, building riverbeds on the fly would be a challenge, I have some ideas in mind but it would need more research." So it sounds like this is all procedurally generated too, that's even more impressive. I've been working on creating procedural water streams myself (see here, here) with some success. My art style is not as high fidelity, but if you if you think it might be of use to you, I'd be happy to be in touch and share details.

 

I'd like to echo what everyone said, this is an absolutely stunning project. Never seen anything approaching this on Unity before. I'd love to know how this was put together and whether you have any plans to release this commercially. Keep up the great work!

 

Thanks a lot for the kind words guys, glad to hear you like it!
There is no plans to put tech on Asset Store or public git, yet at least.
Taking some brake from the project for now, feel very demotivated by recent Unity business decisions.
Thinking on changing engine and find a way to finish it somehow.

 

Yes, many of us do. It's very demotivating to put time and effort wrestling with a game engine to get it to do close to what you want only to have the floor fall out under your feet. I've been exploring Unigine the last few months, but it has it's strong and weak points just like any engine.

 

Yes.

Stunning, Awesome, 10/10

Regards

Peter

 

I'm hooked

 

I bet making this was like a walk in the park for you ha ha Only a silly joke, apologies

 

Amazing