Auto Fence Builder [Released]

This may be a change in the default setting of Project Settings/Player/Static Batching. Unity disallows mesh changes at runtime when this is enabled.
Are you using a fence that has been marked as static?
The good news is that now everyone has access to pro Static Batching in U5, draw call optimisation will be even better.
Thanks for pointing this out, I'll make sure this choice is clear in the next update.

Joe

 

Yes , you are right, I had static batching enabled and final fence marked static...
Thanks

 

HI Guys, is AFB compatible with Unity 5?
Thanks
G.

 

Hi, Yes, it is. When Unity asks you to rebuild the API, you can safely say yes. Everything works well in U5, and v2.0 coming soon will also have new U5 materials added.

Joe

 

Thanks! Off to asset store....

 

Great, drop a line to the support email if you have any questions.

I just noticed in U5, when you load the demo scene, "Scene" is switched off for some reason. You can just re-enable it in the Inspector.

 

Hi I am thinking about to buy your asset, but first I need to know if I can create my own prefab to use as a fence. I am working on a rally-game and the "forest" alongside the road are many miles long of total. It will be a forest-textured plane with som extra tree-planes sticking out of it. Can I make the forest with your fence builder??

Check out -Revvin Studios- at facebook to see my project.

I am aiming at "forest-fences" at the side of the road like in this old rallygame :

Thanks!

 

Interesting use for it... I haven't tried anything like this. Technically it seems possible, though a liitle hard to imagine the result without trying it. If you want to send an example of the tree planes to the support email address ( listed here https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/23201 ), I can show you how it would look in AFB.

Joe

 

Thanks for quick response! I just have to make som textures first

 

Hi Joe,

I just love this tool man.

Fantastic I have saved loads of time creating fences.

I am making a road racing game based on my city. As you can imagine there are lots of fences and walls around the roads and your tool is invaluable when creating these.

Yes you should change name to Fence/Wall as I am using this tools for walls as well.

weber50 - you need to get this tool - you wont regret it.

Fences.jpg = some fences/walls using AFB

Just a small problem.

I am creating a stepped fence, but the subs don't seem to like the "stepped" orientation and seem to be following the slope of the ground instead.

Is there any way around this?

Please see Fence1.jpg, Fence2.jpg, Fence3.jpg

Also it would be great if you could add option to stack panel rails to allow different base and top to the fence.

Also position offset values for subs would be great.

Thanks again!!

Gus

PS. It would also be great for the tool to have ProBuilder Intergration, so PB objects could be used as fences/walls.

 

Hey Gus, thanks for the feedback and the screenshots

Stepped sub-rails - thanks for pointing this out. I think the reason this has never been spotted before is that Stepped Mode is only available with 'Panel' type fences, which don't usually have subs. But I can see you've made great use of customising your own prefabs and found a case for it! If you want to email the support address I'll get a fix to you, along with the ability to change the offsets as requested

Secondary Rail types (stacked) are on the way I'm sorry that it's taken a while to implement this, the key thing is keeping the UI simple and uncluttered, but I think we've found a good solution now. In the meantime you can build a composite rail prefab of your own and use it as an AFB prefab.

Cheers

Joe

 

Two screenshots showing aligned sub-rails when using Stepped mode without a regular Panel. Also an example of offsetting & resizing the subs to get a different design. (I should add for new users that this has always been possible in other modes)

 

Thanks for the quick reply and update Joe!

Great tool!

Here is another wall I made using AFB.
G.

 

Nice work Gus!... that's some pretty impressive customization. So I guess the top & bottom walls are really one panel rail? And the white posts are sub-posts? Or is the whole lot just one big panel Rail?

Chuffed to bits seeing this because I know formatting your own prefabs can be tricky at first, owing to how Unity/Blender/Max/Maya/Cinema all disagree on axis directions, pivot position etc.
Can I ask which software you modelled it in, and did it require any 90 degree flips to find the correct orientation?

 

Is there a way for me to insert a custom wall/fence?

Thanks.

 

Yes there is. AFB needs to know that the approx sizes, pivot position, and orientation are consistent with its other prefabs; this can require a couple of tweaks depending on which software you modelled it in, as it can diifer from Unity, particularly on axis definition.

If you already have AFB, there's some guidelines on page 15 of the manual.
Short answer - yes, but the first time you do it, the model might need flipping 90 degrees to align correctly.
(Easiest thing to do is load one of AFB's fbx in to your modelling software, and copy its format)
Any problems, send us an fbx and we'll show you.

Joe

 

hi Joe, sorry for not replying sooner.

All modeled in 3ds.
Some needed 90 degrees rotation left or right but achieved this using the offset value within AFB.
This wall is made of a panel_rail which is larger at the bottom part, subposts and posts.

Have made others too.

I usually start by importing one of your fbx files into 3ds and then use that as a guide to what I want to make.

BTW, The addition offset values and correction of stepped position for subs is working great! No probs with this.

What would really make your tool even greater (if possible) is the ability to create fence objects using ProBuilder objects.
PB allows you to create and edit geometry within unity editor.

Imagine the possibilities of your tool in conjunction with realtime editing of fence objects inside unity.

take care.

G.

 

Thanks for the update Gus. I'll take a look at ProBuilder and get back to you, see if there's a way to use procedural objects like that.
Would love to see some more screenshots of any of your custom builds when you get something you're happy with.

Cheers

Joe

 

Hi Joe,

When I finish my project I will ask permission and see if I can put all my custom fence objects in a free addon pack for AFS.

I am having a couple of issues I need your help with.

1. I am making a wall which has airbricks. I created using alpha for transparency. When I build wall, the whole wall seems transparent not just the alpha'ed areas. (please see attached file and image)

2. I created a post, basically a rect post with a sphere on top. The mesh is merged into one object.
When I "Create Merged-Mesh Copy" the spheres disappear. (http://linares.gi/video/AFB-WinstonFencePost-problem.rar)

3. When creating fences with rect posts the post follow orientation as that of direction of fence. Is It possible to add a condition so that when a fence is at right angles 90degs , the post is also at right angle. (Please see image)

Regards
G.

 

Heres 3 more....

 

Hi Gus, thanks for the screenshots, looking good, is that Gibraltar that you're recreating? (the sign is kind of a clue)

The reason the spheres seem to disappear is because of stacking 2 materials on that post. "Create Merged-mesh Copy" is to reduce the drawcalls to the minimum , and having 2 materials would double the amount of drawcalls. If you're using Unity 4.x, then it's best to combine the 2 textures in to a texture atlas, which can then use the same material.
If you're on Unity 5, the good news is you can now use Edit/ProjectSettings/Player Static Batching (which used to be a Pro only feature). After you've 'Finished' the fence, instead of using our Merge-Mesh, mark the finished fence as static, and Unity will batch the meshes, often resulting in a single drawcall. You will have the best of both worlds then, you can keep your dual materials and benefit from the optimisation. You will need to remove/disable the 'CombineChildren' script on the subfolders as Unity will complain at trying to combine static batched meshes. There's a post at the top of this page addressing the same workflow.
(We'll remove this Merged-Mesh feature in a future update, but at the moment while people are still transitioning from U4 to U5 it might still be needed.). Drop me a line if you need help with this; it looks like you're using lots of long fences, I think going the static-batching route would be of performance benefit generally.

The alpha problem: I'm guessing this might be a shader or image format problem as AFB doesn't touch user-materials at all. If you can send a package I'll take a look. In the meantime, see how it compares to the Gilded Assassin preset setup which is also reliant on alpha.

The 90 degree one is interesting, basically to prevent the post rotation from interpolating. This is do-able, maybe based on a range 85-95 degrees. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

Hi Joe, thanks for the suggestions - will try out and report back.
Yes this is Gibraltar.
Check out:

Take care
Gus

 

Bought it! Great asset, looking forward to using this - if I place down a ton of fences in the current version will they still be there when I upgrade to v2 without any issues?

 

Hey, thanks for getting back, I edited my above post. After deleting it and trying again it worked, must have forgot the finish bit, not sure though. All resolved. Looking forward to v2

I like the way each section has a collider, should be useful to crash into it with a car and knock down parts of the fence.

 

Hi, sorry another question. Is there LOD planned? Even culling each section after a set distance would be helpful for games with lots of fences.

 

No worries, if you need any help with anything, drop us a line.
(I deleted the other post because 1. no longer relevant 2. Who's Steve?? ... then I realised someone else was logged in on the browser!)

LOD - good question! 90% of the fence parts are very low poly and could barely be LOD'd down any further in terms of mesh, but maybe a small saving could be had in using simple diffuse shaders on everything.
Culling after a set distance is a good idea, I'll look in to it and get back to you. (though this is possible to set up in Unity independent of AFB afaik)
Are you using Unity 5 with Static Batching enabled? In this scenario I've seen kilometer-long fences making barely a difference in frame-rate (Though I appreciate every usage case can be very different)

Cheers

Joe

 

I was wondering that myself Edited my post just in case I was going mad

Yeah, using Unity 5. Just gave you a review.. not sure what the last person was thinking.. great time saving asset! Especially when you are developing on your own but looking like a 5 man team!

My game is an open world, while I will be using Streaming for each section of the terrain (2000x2000) and 122 tiles currently, some of the big cities need major LODs and culling from a distance to keep frame rates low, so even by taking out sections of fences from a distance will help overall. I'm not sure if I'm using Static Batching enabled (good point, I will check!) but was planning on using Sectr asset for this so LOD may not be required - I'll get back to you on that once I've tested. Ideally I don't want to create one big mesh, as I want everything in the game to be damaged, including fences being crashed into, blown up into bits etc

I was thinking that if you could add a toggle for distance LOD that would just cull each section from a distance, it would be a huge time saver having to add it in each section would probably take days overall. But no biggy.

 

yes, by default I'm using static and dynamic batching enabled.

 

@fred_gds Any luck on this? I too have a need for AFB to run in realtime. Any pointers? Thanks

 

Hi Doug, I replied to your email, but also seeing the post you quoted reminded me that Fred got in touch some time ago to say that he'd had some success with this.
Just for the sake of anyone else reading this thread I'll mention that it's a performance issue. While it appears smooth in the Editor, trying to modify and re-calculate the trig for 100s of parts can be tricky to maintain a good frame-rate in realtime, which is why it's not a supported feature.

 

alternatively you could create the fences you need (convert them to meshes) and use the Modular Building System (asset) to place your fences in real-time. Or add in a real time drag and drop function for meshes with a checkbox for snapping (on/off), although rotation may have to be manual, unless you add in some sort of pivot - depends how good you are at coding. Above maybe a short-term fix, but I don't know what is planned for v2 AFB

 

@julianr. Your usage makes a good case for a simple culling system. Could you email us at the support address, I'd be interested in finding something that works in your situation prior to bundling something in the next release.

Thanks for the review Yeah, we were a bit bummed at our first negative review, not least because I'm sure we could have solved his issue with a bit of collaboration.

Your project sounds big, so do you tend to break your fences up in to smaller 'Finished' sections, and is this what you're referring to as a "section"?

 

Version 2

We're switching over to Unity 5 PBR materials in V2. A lot of textures were re-authored, and prefabs rebuilt.

To supply both in the new package would mean a 1Gb + download, as well as trying to maintain two versions.

We also plan to remove the Mesh Combine and Merged-Mesh Copy utilities on 'Finished' fences, as Static Batching in U5 gives equally good performance.

Ideally we'd like to make a clean switch to Unity 5, but realise some users might still be using it in U4.

For these reasons we're thinking of making V2 as Unity 5.0+ only, while supplying a link for people to download a Unity 4 / AFB 1.x version.

If anyone has any concerns or suggestions about this, by all means mention them here.

Thanks

Joe

 

@Two_Click_Tools - sure I'll email support Thanks. When you create a row of fences with collision added, it adds collision to each part, which is great. However the contents between each post and one of the posts probably need to be grouped or put into a prefab before they can be culled as a group, so when you are out of range each section vanishes.

Like so.. A, B, C being posts, and numbers inside are what makes up the rest of the fence. <A>1234<B>5678<C> ... A+1234 vanishes, then B+5678 etc as an example, but you may have a better idea.

 

Apologies if I'm saying the obvious, but don't forget to mark your fence folders as Static (it's easy to overlook!).

 

Do they still need to be static if you need to knock them down? I would have thought they needed to be dynamic, as they are being moved.

 

Hi Two_Click_Tool,

I'm wanting to purchase your asset, but the main feature I'm looking for is being able to build fences during runtime. So the main reason I'm posting is to let you know that I'm one more person that really would like to see a runtime implementation of this asset The end-goal here (for me) is to allow my players to build their own fences during the game.

Secondly though, I'm kind of an "intermediate" programmer myself, and so I was wondering if it's semi-easy to simply write some scripts myself to hook into your main wall builder script that will allow me to mimic the wall building that is done in the editor, but during runtime. Or is there something that would keep me from being able to do so during runtime? So is there a reason why you are able to "procedurally" generate the fence in the editor, but NOT during runtime?

Could I simply write my own scripts that would modify the parameters in your main script, or place nodes during while in-game.......etc?

I've been waiting for an asset like this for awhile, and glad I came across it here. I look forward to any future updates.

 

Hi Velo222

Thanks for your interest, and yes that question has come up a few times now. Although I've mentioned in previous replies about performance concerns in realtime, the biggest worry is providing support if we make it part of the official release, with no control of the environment in that it's trying to generate/deform 1000s of rails, posts and other components at 30 or 60 fps. "When using AFB-runtime my game has dropped to 20fps!!!" etc.

That said, with sensible limitations on the player's building options, it can work well
If you email the support address (you can find it here https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/23201)
I'll happily send you a demo, along with some basic code showing how to hook in to it for realtime use.

"Could I simply write my own scripts that would modify the parameters in your main script, or place nodes during while in-game.......etc?"

Yes, placing nodes is the only key realtime mod that is necessary, the design/editing features will work out of the box once you hook in to the main building class.

Cheers

Joe

 

Nice! I'm glad to hear that. Fortunately, my game won't require a whole lot of fps while the player is building the wall. I could even force the player to wait a bit while the wall builds actually (if I have to).

I would love a demo to test it out. I'll send an email then to the support address. Thanks for the quick reply and info.

 

Great tool, but I have the following issue EVERY TIME I use this tool.

When I click "Save and start new fence"
It begins saving the meshes to my project folder, and somewhere along the way (last time it was at saving mesh 23/120), it had some kind of error:

>UnityException: Creation asset at path Assets/Auto Fence Builder/TempMeshesForFinished/TempMeshes 10-19-2015 14-48-12/SimpleBlock_Panel_Rail sheared 30 failed

What is causing this? I have uninstalled and re-imported AutoFenceBuilder but the issue persists

 

Hi, sorry to hear you've had a problem. Could you email the support address and I'll get a solution to you ASAP. (UK time in case you don't get an answer straight away)

Thanks

Joe

 

Hi. Is it possible to use this runtime now? I need a system to add some fences from script. If not is it a big job for me to do a rewrite?

 

Hi
If you email the support address ( you can find it here https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/23201 ) I can send you a demo version along with a very basic example of how you could add a runtime UI.

"is it a big job for me to do a rewrite?"
It only required 5 lines of code to be changed on our side. But making an interface for the player is completely up to each user.

Having worked with 3 people who wanted to do this, I can confirm that it can work and run well, within certain performance constraints. There are still no plans to add it to the main release as it's become clear that 99% of what's needed would be unique to the user's game and UI. (But we will include a simple beta example)

 

BTW, this was fixed. It's in the upcoming update, but if anyone sees this issue before then, please email for a fix.

 

Hi.

Couple questions:

When is 2.0 due? I am using Unity 5.

Can a fence be made with the posts only showing on one side? Rather than posts in the center of the run line.

Can a palisade fence be made, which is basically a solid wall of (sub) posts embedded in the ground, and with occasional main posts and horizontal support posts all on the back side?


Look forward to your response.

 

Hi

V2.0 will be submitted 16th December, so should be on the Asset Store before christmas. The delay has been in replacing 100's of texture maps with Unity 5 Standard Shader PBR materials.
You know the current version runs fine in Unity 5 right? You only need to agree to the API update when requested.

Re. Posts on one side, do you mean like this:


If so, increase Rail Options/Rail Position Offset/Z (You might also increase Rails Size X to close any gaps)
If not can you post an image of what you mean.

Re. Palisade, do you mean:


Those are subposts that are close together to form a solid wall. If this is what you mean, here are the settings below. If this what you need, it would be better to design a Panel_Rail that replaces 10+ subposts in one mesh for performance. I can help you with this if you show me exactly what you'd like.
(Ignore the blue parts, I'm on v2.0 and didn't want to confuse it with settings that aren't in your version)
Try a google image search if I've misunderstood what you need.


Cheers

Joe

 

Thanks for the quick response, Joe,

I can see from the images you provided that I can position the posts, etc. as I hoped.

On the Palisade, I am referring to the wooden log style Palisade walls surrounding old forts. I need to construct some fort walls, and I believe I can use fence builder to do most of the heavy lifting. If you Google "Palisade wall" the images are right there. A wooden Palisade fort wall is little more than a big fence with sharpened wooden poles.

Wood

 

Hi Joe. Loving this asset pack, can't wait for the next update. We use it a lot! Is there a way we can add our own meshes easily in v2, or do we need to make custom changes to the code?

 

Hi Julian, nice to hear from you again. In next week's update there won't be any changes to how custom meshes are added, but I can help you if you're having difficulty, or just send me the mesh & textures and I'll convert them to AFB prefabs. Either way, there's no coding involved, it's just making sure your models meet the requirements on Page 15 of the manual.

We are working on making the process of adding custom meshes quicker. At the moment the issue is with axis/orientation/pivot differences in Max/Maya/Blender/Cinema4D etc. Which modeller do you use?
It would be good to get feedback from you or anyone doing this a lot about how they would like to see it implemented.

I'l mention the V2 features here, in case there's any suggestions we can include before next week:

• Mixing more than one rail/panel/wall type in a fence.
• Unity 5 PBR materials (and removing the API update warning)
• Many new post/rail/panel/wall parts.
• More control over randomness of each piece
• Variations to disguise repeats - e.g. panel/wall textures can be Rotated/Mirrored so repeats appear to be different
• Snapping - Clicked posts can be aligned to the Unity world grid
• Panels/walls can be extended where they join to hide gaps (e.g. where 2 square ends meet at 90deg, they can overlap)
• Subposts can be re-positioned independently of posts & rails
(Edit)---------------------
* Cloning - you can clone an existing fence, change the parts on the clone, enabling unlimited mixing of different designs, or even stacking entire fences.

 

Sure. I tend to use ProBuilder, or Blender - it really depends on what I need. It would be a nice idea to use any prefab, like you say.. I must read manuals more thanks for pointing out page 15 - i'll take a look. Nice set of updates for v2 it will up the quality for sure!

Here's a screenshot from my game.