Can Unity make a 3D forest like this?

Have fun: Once you get the road right, then you have to worry about terrain deformation... then line up the shadows properly

If you're off on something like the camera perspective, everything else might have to be adjusted!

 

Is the bounty still open? I'll try to do something the next week if it its.

 

Yes, still on, and no fixed deadline yet assigned.

 

Getting desperate.. started making tool for placing trees and then terrain bumps using the photo as reference.. not quite working yet.

 

The textures seems blurred without volulme on floor and vegetation have appearent low poly polygons.

What about using detailled vegetation and ground like these ones ? It will change a lot the overall look.

 

Original and Vr. n°: 8

 

Nice!

Some comments
Road texture looks bit "stretched",
could try adding some noise posteffect (like in original photo),
shadow is more blueish in original

 

Good progress.

 

Also the question is... Would you like to have a scenery like that in real time or offline? If it's real time for a real game... Hehehe . Now discussing about some workarounds for SpeedTree, and SpeedTree grass at the forum post "Speed Tree optimizations?".

The real-time trees are easier to tackle but real time grass is another story.

 

@Assembler-Maze
No limit on the FPS, so technically you could create super heavy, unplayable scene..just going for the best looks.


Also, lets say the deadline is at December 11th, so that can close this one, and still have enough time to finish up.

 

$250? Sounds good to me. Is it required to submit the project and assets or will a screenshot (and maybe a build) suffice?

 

Screenshot is enough to enter, just going for best looks.

Although if its looks amazing then posting some info about how it was made, what kind of assets used,
or few extra shots from scene/image effects stack/settings would be nice, so everyone can learn.

 

How accurate to the original image should it be? What I have now is basically "road through a forest with light pouring in". I'll post a picture of what I have so far as soon as Unity finishes its long, long baking process.

 

As accurate as possible, as that was the op question

 

Not finished yet, but here's what I have so far.

 

Quick update

 

Good work.
If you want to push it further you need to bring small details like micro grass and gravels and add granularity, actually it is visible it's polygons with textures and we sse the seams between the 3D models on floor.

 

Replaced the painstakingly hand-crafted mesh trees with a blend of custom trunk + Unity tree creator leaves. That's the biggest change here. Also I have officially broken the 33 million triangle mark (still running at 30 FPS on a 970, amazingly).

 

How does it look if put camera in the center (like original image, so cannot see the empty white on side),
or with more blue'ish shadows/ambient? And try some light shafts/god rays.

 

I prefer a purer, less color-crunched image. I suppose I could try changing the ambient light, right now I'm using Unity's default procedural skybox. There are light shafts in the scene, I'm using them in the trees on the right side with a sharp attenuation; otherwise, they fog up the scene, which doesn't look good at all.

 

Still not sure if I'm completely done, but at the moment I'm fairly happy with how it looks. I don't like the dry, plain lighting, but that's what the original scene looked like so I did my best to replicate it.

 

Oh, few months got skipped in world time? : D..
Anyways, will pick the winner on this coming sunday!

 

Excellent. I still stand by my willingness to contribute

 

I still want to submit one more update. I'll get it in before Sunday.

 

Here's (probably) my final submission. Any critiques or suggestions?

 

Here it is again, with slightly improved(?) colors. I tried making it a little more accurate to the original, but ended up not changing much.


And here it is with colors closer to what I'd use if I had more artistic freedom:

 

Nice, maybe light-rays could be "stronger / sharper" like in original,
tree branches are bit dense with leaves (but probably difficult to adjust that)..

 

I wasn't able to make the sun shafts sharper, due I think to the heavy post processing. I considered it to be a very small issue though, so I didn't try any further to fix it.

And yes, too late to be adjusting trees I'm afraid.

 

Close-up shot of a tessellated trunk.

 

Ok, i guess its past sunday in pretty much every timezone by now.

I counted these as entries, since they contained the road path:
- looki666 https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/can-unity-make-a-3d-forest-like-this.401126/#post-2634716
- Flurgle https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/can-unity-make-a-3d-forest-like-this.401126/#post-2636467
- Sir-Spunky https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/can-unity-make-a-3d-forest-like-this.401126/#post-2655540
- FromLions https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/can-unity-make-a-3d-forest-like-this.401126/#post-2673799
- AlanMattano https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/can-unity-make-a-3d-forest-like-this.401126/page-2#post-2735760
- cdmpants https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/can-unity-make-a-3d-forest-like-this.401126/page-2#post-2880989


And the winner is... @AlanMattano , that image looks very near to the original (and that was the goal).
Only the ground texture is bit stretchy, but otherwise the colors, lights, effects, tree placement, etc. are very near to the source photo.

Thanks everyone for participating, i'll want to do some other scene bounty probably starting in January, so hope to see you there.

 

If you don't mind me saying so, what you said was "i'll offer bounty if someone makes amazing scene similar to that image", which I succeeded in doing far better than anyone else. My image is quite good, and very similar to the reference image. This was a test of the limits of Unity- not to see who could spend the most time making sure every leaf is as accurate as possible to the reference material. As the original poster said,

"Recently, I found this picture is astonished. And think this will be a very good demonstration for us.
is there any trick that we can make it possible by using Unity3D?"

He was obviously referring to the quality of the image and if it can be replicated in Unity, as nothing more than an example.
When he refers to "trick", he means techniques and methods to use- If he wanted someone to copy each blade of grass exactly, he would have specified so.

I mean no ill toward the winner of the bounty, I only wish you would judge based on attributes that make sense in the real world.

 

I will try to make public all the info and asset example.


gif source @zombiegorilla

 

I'm sorry if the intention or wording was not clear..

My original descriptions were: "i'll offer bounty if someone makes amazing scene similar to that image"
and "I’ll offer 250usd bounty to whoever makes the best 3D scene based on this image above, using Unity"..

so for me the goal was always trying to make scene like that image.. also the comments in this thread were directing people to match original style, trees, colors, lights.. But certainly will try to make it more clear next time.

 

For VR you will want to dive into Scanned Real Displacement Textures (RDT) for use with Tessellation -surfaces wont look flat in VR http://real-displacement-textures.com/
Also I recently discovered a new Splatmap tool for terrains and meshes that will allow you to use up to 256 Textures! paint puddles etc https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/76166 It will be a bit expensive on performance until it gets optimized but you can also try SEGI for realistic lighting https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/64763 SE Screen space shadows https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/77836 When I created this video i was experimenting.. I didn't have the textures set up correctly

Here is a better view of the experiment with the RDT
I was using a different tessellation shader when I created that video.. now I'm using MegaSplat.

 

@Ascensi I'd love to see what those RDT textures look like on a highly tessellated mesh with MegaSplat.. Quality textures make a huge difference, especially with PBR and tessellation..

 

That's what I'm working on! Still having problems combining textures.. i think. I'm using a combining tool that I purchased for $5 https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/61911 I have another from the asset Landscape Auto Material (texture combiner) but that one isn't working.


Does this look right to you for Normal, Smooth & AO? I imported the textures into photoshop just to see what it's doing.


I have a black spill from painting on a single texture and things aren't tessellating yet.

Update: I looked at one of your diffuse textures in photoshop.. looks like I'm missing an alpha channel.

I'm also going to compare your demo settings to get more of an understanding.

 

Nope, you only have 3 channels there. Normal R/G should go into the R/G channels, smoothness in the B channel, and Ambient Occlusion should go into the Alpha channel.

 

I've been super busy on other projects, so haven't been able to get back onto this, but I can say for sure that CDMpants actually has by far the best one. If he spent some time adding correct moss, proper grass, and lining up trees correctly, and editing colors, it would be the closest by a long shot.

He had the best ground, the most realistic shading, lighting, etc.

I'll be honest, I'm a bit disappointed that @cdmpants didn't win. The OP clearly wanted a photo realistic scene, and he had the only one that was close to photorealistic. Then again, there really was no winner yet. It should be ongoing... until someone has the colors + tree branch + ramping + textures + ground moss / leaves / rock placement very close.


As for lining things up: Actually if you line up my version with the original in GIMP or Photoshop it might actually be the closest (colors + trees / road / ramp / rock), but I never got the branches and leaves done.

 

I don't want to start an argument but I did get the feeling that mgear wanted an exact replica, especially from his comments in the thread, so that's what I focused on in my submission. In regard to that interpretation, I think he chose the correct winner.

Cdmpants did a great work and his image was of high quality, but it was too different from the original if the focus was replication.

I understand that some put more focus on quality rather than similarity, and I agree that mgear could have been more clear about his intentions, but he did apologize for it and will hopefully be more clear next time. So let's just support mgear and appreciate the fact that he's giving away money like this, and hope that he will host more competitions in the future.

In terms of the end goal, I agree with Flurgle that we didn't quite get there, but it's nice of mgear to still want to finish the competition and move on, so I also support that decision.