ForestVision [ Artist Essentials Product ]

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/59910

No Subscription required!

ForestVision is a unique approach to creating trees in your scenes. Trees are customizable, right in the editor! AND you can build your own varieties in the editor as well!

Includes built in tools and shaders which provide you with the means to build out a custom tree, and collapse it down to a single mesh, perfect for Terrain painting!

As a designer, I found myself artistically constrained with simple trees that I could not tweak in the editor. I would have to result to going back to SpeedTree, or some other tree app and make a new alteration there, then import the new variety and hope it fits with my vision of the scene. After a while, I decided I needed to just build a library of assets that gave me the freedom I wanted. Hence, the creation of ForestVision.

Simple productivity tool, allows you to easily reset the transforms of your trees if you find that base scales are not fitting with your scene. Perfect for scale, or setting new pivot points on your meshes!



What you are getting with this package is an incredible amount of resources to enable the artist to truly explore their vision for a scene. From initial tree setups all the way down to individual branches, I am giving you everything you need to build entire forests, or even just specialized worlds where the vegetation needs to be unique. Each Foliage texture is vertex animated giving life to the leaves, and branches.

My initial thought was to call this product "TreeKit" as that is just what it is, a collection of assets that are pulled together to create new, fresh species of plants and trees.

View attachment 726416
The beauty of this product, and another reason why I sought out to create my own library, is that each tree is fully customizable. Using the wealth of assets provided, you can make the perfect "hero" tree. Speedtree and Unity's trees are perfect if you want fast procedural trees that simply populate your background. But if you want trees that actually can help tell your story, this is the way to go.

For example, you have a tree that looks wonderful, but from your main shot, you can see that your tree is composed of very flat polygons with images mapped onto them. This really kills the immersion when you can spot such incredibly flat surfaces.



With ForestVision, that flat branch can be rotated, or duplicated to help remove that noticeable flat surface, returning your tree to a seemingly full and lush entity in your world.

Ready made trees--which can be altered to your hearts content at any time
Vines, bushes, flowers, leaves, ground vegetation, grasses, as well as the building blocks of every tree, and for new trees that you can create!

 

Amazing images, but

- Video, Webplayer or WebGL-Player?
- LOD?
- PBR?
...

 

Impressive looking. Are your screenshots from demo scenes, included in the package?
Also...how's performance?

 

Looking good!

 

I'm working on getting a video together, as well as a webplayer demo.

Currently these assets support just about any shader that you can find as they are simply models. They ship using the speedtree shader, but I am developing the shaderforge version now, and soon will write my own shader to add in the wind animation.

I ship each trunk texture with its Diffuse, Normal, AO and Height maps. Leaf maps--since Speedtree has the proper 2 sided material setup, ship with Diffuse and Normal.

I have switched certain models--mainly branches over to the Standard Shader for some shots where I need the specularity that the Speedtree or Unity Tree shader simply do not offer.

In regards to LODs, I use MeshBaker to bake down versions of the trees that I like into more draw call friendly versions. I will be including these baked models in a future update as well.

Most of my work currently is geared towards a 4K res short film animation and I simply do not need LODs. I need those trees in the distance to maintain the detail they have. But because you can create any tree you want from this package, you can make your LOD varieties.

 

Sounds very interesting to me.
I absolutely like the idea of a shaderforge shader!
What about 3D transforming to billboards, do you support this?
Please dont forget to support horizontal billboards for vertical topdown views like in a flightsimulator.
Speedtree still sucks here.

Looking forward to see video and webplayer!

 

I will definitely keep those things in mind! Thanks!

 

The screenshots of the different environments are not included as they contain too many other 3rd party plugins.

I primarily use Gaia for initial env lay down, then Time of Day for lighting and fog effects, coupled with a handful of post processing effects.

Performance wise the assets themselves are very optimized polygonally, but wanting to give artists more freedom, and ease of customization, I did not focus too heavily on draw call optimization. That is where MeshBaker comes in.

Most of those scenes are incredibly high in draw calls and poly counts because I was going for an artistic vision, not focused on delivering it on a platform other than video or high res screen shots. But again, my hope is that it frees the artist up to create their own trees that meet their specific needs. My personal trees, and scenes can get very intense, mainly because I have a Titan X in my work machine, but also because I'm always capturing screenshots at 4K+ and then going in and seeing where I can push things.

If I worked up some examples that strictly used out of the box Unity tools would that interest you?

Main reason I did not do this approach initially is because I wanted to show my final works using the assets.

 

I really like whats going on here. I use and am always looking for a great set of trees to use in my environments. But I'm confused by what you mean customizable? Are you meaning that each branch/leaf is a seperate model and you move by hand yourself in the editor with the move and rotate tools or the tree itself has customizable options to move things around such as what speed tree provides in there editor. Looking really good though can't wait to test out and see how this evolves.

Yes so definitely trees have to have a wind component with customizable options how to control the wind. Without wind on trees and vegetation scenes feel and look flat and uninteresting so def please get that working first very important as your making customized shaders for your system.

Some sort of roots or things to control the bottom half of the way trees look to give them that natural bottom look. Just scaling out the bottom of trees doesn't work anymore for games.

-Miguel

 

I agree that wind is important to have, luckily shaderforge does ship with a basic vertex animation system so it won't be too hard to get things going. As far as writing my own shader, that will be a tad more of a process.

When I say customize, I mean that each tree is made up of a trunk and branches. Each branch has a proper pivot for rotation and scale at its base for positioning. All of these come together as prefabs that you can do with as you please.


I provide almost 20 base prefab trees to start you off.

Additionally, you have 12 different branch base meshes to chose from, which are composed of the branch itself, and then the leaf mesh. You then have base leaf meshes to further fluff out your trees with. I also provide you with the PSD files which contain the UV layout for all of these leaf meshes so you can tweak that as well.


As bonuses, to help you complete your ultimate ForestVision I added in a collection of Flora...



A collection of ground vegetation, from grass, to dry bamboo, to dead leaves, moss and dead branches...



And finally, a nice collection of vines.

 

Looks great - interested to see how you go with this - and thanks for the Gaia mention - I put a post on the Gaia thread and recommended that people come check this out

 

Looks great! I like all of the tree parts I'm hearing about. I don't see stumps mentioned though. Will those be available as well?

 

look great

 

Looking great,

Is it possible to do an earlier Unity version submission, 5.2 maybe ?
You are automatically reducing your possible user base by release with latest version only
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity-version-usage-might-be-useful-for-package-devs.250891/

Cheers
Cobus

 

So beautiful!!! just bought it, I advise everyone to do the same

 

That's awesome Adam, thanks a ton!

 

I agree with you, I will be pushing up a 5.2 version this week. I was having a terrible time with Unity crashing on upload--I originally went all the way back to 5.0, but that was where all the crashes happened. So out of frustration, I tried in the only other version I had installed, which was the latest obviously--and the upload went through.

Thank you for reminding me, I will make a push tonight to upload it in 5.2

 

Awesome, jimmi! Thank you, please submit a review if you get the chance, I would greatly appreciate that.

 

Thanks,
I bought it as well in support and I would like to use it, in the very least v5.2 would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers
Cobus

 

Yes I do have the stumps as well. Thanks for reminding me!

 

I've also included 15 different trunk textures each with AO, Height and Normal maps.

Sizes range from 512 x 512, to 2048 x 4096. They were all originally 8K textures, but obviously that bloated the mess out of the package size, and I just couldn't see enough of a difference in my work to justify such an incredible increase in package size.

 

Thank you very much! I will push up 5.2 tonight in support of you in particular!

 

Hmmm.. Wondering if it will work back as far as 5.1? I know Gaia and my POI Packs both support back to 5.1. If you can support back that far, it would be a great options for all of the Gaia folks without having to worry about versions. I'll get it loaded in my POI Builder project in the next couple of days and let you know if there are any issues with 5.1.. If not, it might be worth downloading to support even more versions. Wonder what was causing the 5.0 crashes?

These are cool too.. I was thinking more along the lines of stumps where trees have been chopped down.

 

Will do

 

[QUOTE=" I was thinking more along the lines of stumps where trees have been chopped down.[/QUOTE]

Right on. It's been on my list to get these kind of varieties created. I have a few more trunk types to make, and I will do the stumps at that time as well.

 

Those are beautiful screenshots! Is there a way to automatically generate the trees from the pieces? Does it use the older Unity tree system? It seems like it could be tedious to create dozens of variations, but I might be missing something.

 

These images really do look fantastic! Nice work! \m/

I definitly could use great looking trees for my game 'Seventh Crystal...', because some locations require the need for trees of different types: northern vegetation, jungle, desert, mountain. So, my question would be: will you also provide such trees/vegetation?

Like, the first levels in my game are in winter like environments, which means that i'd need great looking trees and veggies with snow on. If you could make and add them, i would definitly consider buying your asset.

One more thing that i would like to know is: will you add an LOD system? And, what about PBR compatibility?

Cheers,
Chris

 

@IFL

A major aspect that I am coming at this project from is the ability to customize these trees as much as possible within Unity.

That being said, as I continue to develop FV, I will continue to release updates which will contain more and more models to help you create tons of different trees.

A large part of these updates will include new pre-arranged Prefabs. I eventually will get to a point where I will have these Prefabs broken into species of trees, but that is a stretch goal for the moment.

When you buy FV right now, you get 18 different Prefabs to place in your scene right away as seen here:



I'm currently developing the system that will handle "auto generation" but honestly, it be more of a prefab loading system than anything.

These Prefabs do not use the Unity tree system, but I am developing a set of Unity Trees based on my texture collections, these will be in the next update.

In regards to creating varieties, it really is pretty rapid when you base it off an existing prefab. For example, my typical workflow for the short film animation I am using FV to help design the environments with, I will drag in a prefab tree, and copy it around the scene. Then when I need more variety in a particular tree, I will select on a branch or group of branches, and alter them to my liking.

I might copy whole sections or branches just to make the tree denser, or delete sections to thin it out. Being that they are prefabs, I can easily make those changes on the fly, and as long as I don't apply those changes to the prefab itself, my workflow is pretty straightforward and clean. Every model has a correctly aligned pivot so altering branch rotations are intuitive.

 

@mcbauer,

Hi Mcbauer, really nice vegetation pack. Have you seen this - https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/21079. I don't own it yet and not affiliated but it may be useful to you if you want to make assets into unity type trees. His AFS asset is top notch as well.

doc

 

Thanks Chris! \m/ indeed!

First off LODs. Setting up these trees for LOD is very easy because the nature of the trees themselves are very customizable. Making a hero tree with a million polys can happen within minutes, and then adjusting that tree--with a copy of it--that you go in and delete polys from is straightforward. You then load that tree in as LOD1 via the LOD script, and continue on for as many steps as you need.

I haven't been interested in going in and setting them up yet, because my current project--the project that inspired me to make FV, is a 4K short film animation and when I push a tree into the distance, I do not want it lowering detail, or billboarding. I need that detail so I bypassed that particular stage for the time being.

My main goal with ForestVision is to come at trees with a very different approach in Unity altogether. As an artist, I am always finding myself frustrated with trees that are already out there because I cannot adjust them in my scene without taking them in 3ds Max.

My hope with ForestVision is to allow more artists, and mainly programmers who maybe don't have access to 3ds max, or Maya to go in and make those kind of mesh adjustments right inside of Unity. I even provide you with the most basic of polygon meshes--flat planes, curved planes, etc., that can simply be textured and used right away. There really is no need for me to open up a third party program any more when developing my scenes---except to make new content of course!

Everything I need is right here in this package, and that really is my goal with FV.

I have alot of ambitious designs for the future development of ForestVision, but for now I'm just trying to load it up with a ton of content.

I will add in some snow covered assets very soon, but just so you know, I do include the PSDs for all of the leaf meshes so you can see how the UVs are laid out. Therefore it wouldn't be hard at all to go in and add snow to the textures that are already there. But, with that being said, Snow covered assets are on my list of things to get into the next update! Thanks for the feedback!

 

Yes, that looks like an awesome tool! I will have to check it out for sure, thanks for showing me!

 

No problem. Hope it works well for you.

 

This is an awesome asset. Will review in a bit.

For everyone wanting ForestVision to support LOD, I just tried Simple LOD with it and it works really well.

 

Awesome! Glad you liked it! I have so much more to add too! Just wait for these next few updates to come out!

 

IMHO at that price it's a real gem already

 

@ChrisV

In regards to your snow covered trees, I went in and added a few new textures and created a new Tree just for you. This will be in the next update which I'm uploading tonight.

 

Looks awesome, man! Thanks for taking the time! \m/

Looking forward to see more snowed vegetation and trees (whenever you have the time, of course).

 

Last night I pushed up ForestVision under the 5.1 umbrella. Hopefully that opens the door wider for everyone.

 

is there a video so we can see the workflow

 

It's on the list of things to do!

 

ForestVision 1.1 uploaded with 5.1 is up.

I added in the snow tree as well as a few other prefabs, some more textures and re-arranged the whole folder structure to make it easier to update and use.

Currently working on 1.2 now which will contain many more things like:

• MeshBaked trees
  • Currently I took a tree which had vines, ivy and a few other accessories which came in at 122 draw calls, and brought it down to 8 draw calls. My plan is to do this with each of the prefabs that I ship so you will have a very optimized version of each tree.
• A few of the standard trees will not just be MeshBaked, but will also be setup with LODs.
• I'm redoing the PSD files and overhauling the layer setups with not just several new texture sets for different sets of leaves, but also with their snowy versions, spring versions, autumn, and winter versions.
• Added in Pine and Cypress tree textures and branches.

 

Hey there, looking great so far.
For me the ultimate requirement would be wind movement, though. Trees without wind movement are dead assets to me. I'm subscribing to this thread and waiting for this. Keep it up!

 

Yeah, I'm very interested in seeing wind movement as well. I've talked with several people about ForestVision and they love the way everything looks. But the lack of ability of wind to effect things is a game stopper for them. If you can nail that, I think you would be able to pull in a lot more folks.

 

It's reasonably trivial to add wind, just vertex shader sin/cos and affected by vertex alpha, so branches would go from black (thick trunk) to white (thin trunk / foliage) and then in vertex shader calculate vertex position, and add time based sin / cos etc multiplied by the alpha falloff... should work fine.

 

Thanks for the feedback, I have the shader started, and I have the movement, but I would like to set the vertex alpha (as you suggested) with a vertex map that I can assign. Any pointers on this would be great, and would probably wrap up the shader. I need this seperate map because as it stands now, the movement is based on the uvs so the the bottom is no movement and the top is total movement. I have many textures that do not follow this protocol and so assigning the vertex weight map is essential. I'll keep digging for it myself in the meantime.

Wind is almost done!

I could technically push it out now, but in order to do that without this vertex weight map, I'd have to go in and redo quite a few textures--I'd rather avoid that headache.

 

With some fresh eyes from IFL (big thanks BTW), I have succeeded in completing the ForestVision shader.

Granted it is not as robust of a wind system as SpeedTree, and it doesn't use an external force, but it does have wind controls that can be adjusted and tweaked. Along with this tweaking, I have implemented a WeightMap parameter that is used to drive the animation of the foliage. Right now I am going back through and re-setting up all of the assets to use the new shader, as well as creating the weight maps for each.

Again, this is my first shader, so please don't be expecting some super amazing, constantly evolving algorithm that blows away anything you've ever seen. The leaves move. And I'm super happy about it.

I also added in what I believe is a rather nice addition to the movement of the trees, and that is an animating joint for the branches. Basically, if you use this particular prefab branch, it will contain this animating joint, with parameters that you can set for how the branch will be rotated. This gives the effect of the entire branch itself blowing in the wind, and coupled with the shader, I feel that this is a very nice addition to the package, and hopefully you will agree.

A bit more work to do to finish setting up the materials, as well as completing the latest trees and vegetation, but my goal is to push this up by the end of the week. I want to get this update out to everyone so that your trees aren't dead, and once that is out to everyone, I will work on putting together at least once really nice example scene to play with.

Thanks again for everyone's support.

 

Yep the customers are demanding creatures but they do tell what they will pay for

 

I was able to finish the branch movement script as well, so instead of an overly complex setup with an animating joint, you just apply the script to the branch, or objects you want swaying and it takes care of the rest.

Continued development on both the shader, and this script will involved figuring out how to utilize the Wind Zone to affect both.

 

ForestVision 1.2 is ready for upload.

Here is an example of what my ForestVision Wind looks like applied to some of the assets. This wind is applied to the branches and can be controlled globally via my custom Wind Zone actor.

Parameters to adjust globally:

Wind Intensity = essentially turns off and on the overall effect
Angle Multiplier = adjusts how far each branch can sway
Shake Intensity (distance) = adjusts how quickly the branch will shake

The calculations of the branch animations are dependent upon the position of the camera, so if you are too far from the tree, calculations will stop. This distance can be set by you.

This is in addition to the ForestVision Foliage shader which supplies the basic leaf movement.

Also, as you turn off the wind, the branches will slowly return to their starting rotations.

 

Looking pretty good mcbauer! \m/ \m/
Can these parameters also be modified at runtime through script? ?