[FREE] Vegetation Studio Pro Extensions (Open Source, GitHub)

Vegetation Studio Pro Extensions

Introduction

I really enjoy Prototyping with Unity. Most of my projects involve large terrains and populating them with Vegetation Studio Pro and the NatureManufacture assets. However, creating scenes over and over again can take a while. NatureManufacture already released 3 Biomes for Vegetation Studio Pro for their AAA assets, which are ready for use: Meadow Environment, Forest Environment and Ice World. The terrains in Unity become bigger and bigger and so I thought I should facilitate the population of large scale terrains via helper tools. This lead to this Asset, Vegetation Studio Pro Extensions. I thought this might benefit you guys as well, so I put it on GitHub for everyone for free. Download, use, fork, modify however you see fit

Requirements

• Vegetation Studio Pro

Download

• https://bit.ly/VegetationStudioProExtensions

Quick Setup

After you installed it, you'll get a new popup menu for the scene hierarchy:



Features

Mask Spawner

Here's a quick in-use video to get an overview what this is about:

Current features are:

• Create random Biome Masks in various shapes
  • Voronoi
  • Rectangular
  • Hexagon

• Random shape modifier allows to create randomly convex and concave masks
  
  
• Multi-Tile-Terrain (naturally because Vegetation Studio Pro supports it)
  
  
• Shape bounds variation
  
  The bounds used for the shapes can be of the following:

• Combined Terrains
  The bounds of all terrains of your Vegetation System combined
  
  
• Individual Terrains
  All terrains of your Vegetation System are processed individually
  
  
• Biome
  Another Biome Mask Area defines the bounds in which the shapes are created

​

More procedural spawners like Lake creation will follow in a future update.

Please note that this is currently in active development and bound to get non-backwards-compatible changes depending on requirements and feedback. Nontheless, after you are done with the Biome creation, you may as well remove this again, since the rest is just Vegetation Studio Pro standard usage.

Mask Modification

Other features involve the modification of Biome Mask Area, Vegetation Mask Area, Vegetation Mask Line.

• Center / Grow / Shrink Vegetation and Biome Masks
  
  
• Circle
  Get the bounds of the mask and create a circular shape using the existing nodes
  
  
• Hexagon
  Get the bounds of the mask and create a Hexagon
  
  
• Convex Hull
  Get all the nodes of the mask and create a Convex Hull using the node positons
  
  
• Subdivide
  Adds new nodes between the existing nodes
  
  
• Unsubdivide
  Removes every second node

Examples:

Center/Grow/Shrink Vegetation Mask:



Center/Grow/Shrink Biome Mask:



Create Line Mask:



Beta

Please note that this is still beta and work in progress, so features may change and you should backup your project before you use this.

Credits & Thank You

• Lennart Johansen
  For Vegetation Studio and Vegetation Studio Pro and his most awesome support
  https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/25402
  
  
• Bart - NatureManufacture
  For his excellent AAA quality assets and his most awesome support
  https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/6887
  
  
• Rafael Kuebler
  For his MIT-licensed implementation of Voronoi Diagram creation
  https://github.com/RafaelKuebler/DelaunayVoronoi

 

Looks useful, thanks for sharing!

 

One of the most requested features since yesterday was to create lines like NatureManufacture has them in the Meadow Environment demo. I added that feature today, new version is on github. Looks like this:


You can either add them globally or attached to a specified Biome.

 

Very cool!

 

I added RAM 2019 River Creation support:

It is basically a wrapper / batch function for the internal functions of RAM 2019's spline simulation and generation. I left the terrain shaping out, one usually wants to verify the automatically created splines before doing a heavy terrain modification.

In order to use it, please add the scripting define symbol RAM_2019 after you installed RAM 2019.

 

Looks very cool and useful! Was there option to assign different types of biome when creating random biome masks?

 

Thanks. Currently you can assign a single Biome Type which is then being pre-set for all Masks, of course you can change them afterwards using default Vegetation Studio Pro Mask editing. I see the necessity though to select multiple ones randomly. Currently by adding multiple instances of the Extensions you can mix different Biomes. Or you just select a different Biome Type and hit the "Add" button instead of "Clear & Add".

Oh btw, I added a resize option which can be applied to all Biome Masks:


Gives a little padding around the Masks.

I think I better make a video about how to use these, also how you can mix different larger Biomes. But first I have to add one more module.

 

I added an Easy Roads 3D module which allows you to add markers automatically to a road, i. e. you can create circuit race tracks with it. The algorithm sticks to the existing Biome Mask settings, i. e. you could e. g. have the track limited to Biome bounds or Terrain bounds. In the video below the roads are created randomly over 4 Terrains. Looks like this:

The markers are aligned to the terrain in y position, so in addition to what I've shown here it's best if you increase the polygon point count to have the road aligned tighter to the terrain, so that the terrain doesn't get modified that intense.

As always, one thing leads to another and I think it might be even better to thave the road not only being created using a Voronoi cell, but rather have it created along the Voronoi edges of a terrain. This could lead to more realistic landscape roads. I totally have to try that

In order to use it, please add the scripting define symbol EASY_ROADS after you installed Easy Roads 3D.

 

I added a few more features for easier road creation using easy roads 3d. Here's a usage showcase:

 

I toyed around with HDRP yesterday. Main problem is that most Biomes I use don't support Instanced Indirect. Changing the Render Mode of the many Vegetation Items manually to Instanced was too annoying, so I created a batch function for that. In case anyone needs it, it works with the Biome Type as filter:

 

There's a Refresh Prefabs Batch now as well. It applies "Refresh Prefab" on all Vegetation Items of the selected Biome.



Just in case anyone wants to write their own batch, use the class BatchFunctionsEditor.cs

Add inspector ui components like this:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. GUILayout.BeginVertical("box");
3. {
4.    EditorGUILayout.Space();
5.  
6.    EditorGUILayout.LabelField("Refresh", GUIStyles.GroupTitleStyle);
7.    {
8.        if (GUILayout.Button("Refresh Prefabs"))
9.        {
10.            RefreshPrefabs(extension.biomeType);
11.        }
12.  
13.    }
14. }
15. GUILayout.EndVertical();
16.  

implement whatever you want to achieve:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. private class RefreshPrefabsProcessor : VegetationItemsProcessor
3. {
4.    public override void OnActionPerformed(VegetationPackagePro vegetationPackagePro, VegetationItemInfoPro vegetationItemInfoPro)
5.    {
6.        vegetationPackagePro.RefreshVegetationItemPrefab(vegetationItemInfoPro);
7.    }
8. }
9.  

and invoke it:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. private void RefreshPrefabs(BiomeType selectedBiomeType)
3. {
4.    RefreshPrefabsProcessor processor = new RefreshPrefabsProcessor();
5.    int itemChangeCount = processor.Process(selectedBiomeType);
6.  
7.    EditorUtility.DisplayDialog("Refresh Prefabs", "Refresh Prefabs applied to " + itemChangeCount + " items in Biome " + selectedBiomeType, "Ok");
8. }
9.  

 

Awesome work!
I love these quick fixes. I use a ton of vegetation and not being able to load multiple plants at once due to having to switch every one, really made it a pain. Looking forward to trying this out.

I love all of the other things you've made available to us to use, I really appreciate it! And I'm sure everyone else does too.

Thanks for all your hard work and letting us play with it too.

PS: the tropical island looks great! Love the foggy shot.

 

After yesterday's Off-Road Game Creation Timelapse I thought the next logical step would be to add grass and Touch React in order to have the grass bend where the car drives. However for that to be possible one has to activate the TouchReactActive value on all of the plant materials one after the other. In order to make this step easier and quicker I added a new batch function which does that on the NatureManufacture materials:



Once you set that and TouchReact collider is on an object, it should work like this (I made the collider bigger to show the effect better):



Update is live on GitHub.

 

I commited a minor update to GitHub: the Touch React Active is now only applied to Grass and Plants. It was on all vegetation items, even on trees. It didn't make much sense there. In case anyone needs it, I can provide checkboxes for the various types (grass, plants, trees, objects, large objects), just let me know.

 

I modified the filter to list only the Biomes with available Vegetation Packages:



i. e. not all Biomes are listed anymore. In addition to that I added a "Modify All" option in the Batch Functions so that you don't have to click through every single item one after the other.



Unselect the checkbox to get the filter as it was previously:

 

Excellent additions! The batch functions have been very helpful!
Thank you!!!!

 

Thanks for this adddon! Personally I don't feel VSP is complete without installing this little gem

With that being said, It's recently stopped working for me, unsure as to why all I've done is create a new project and installed my defaults (VSP / GAIA / etc), haven't made any changes I'm receiving the following now:

CODE:
cell = new Cell(currentPolygon.ToArray(), centroid, ToVector(point));

ERROR:
Assets\AwesomeTechnologies\VegetationStudioProExtensions-master\Assets\VegetationStudioProExtensions\Common\Graph\Voronoi\DelaunayVoronoiGraph.cs(289,28): error CS1729: 'Cell' does not contain a constructor that takes 3 arguments

I'm not super up to speed on scripting so was hoping you might be able to offer some suggestions when available? Anyway, many thanks!! Awesome addon!

 

Thanks for the kind words

This sounds like a namespace problem. The namespace was missing in the Utils class, but that was fixed in May. Are you using the latest version from github?

 

Yep, I've grabbed the latest from https://github.com/Roland09/VegetationStudioProExtensions

 

Changed my code, new version is on GitHub. The problem wasn't with mine, but with another asset which had a same named class "Cell" embedded in a file without a namespace, i. e. it was on global namespace which has precedence over local. I changed mine nontheless to make it work.

 

I made an update in order to support Train Controller. You can take the railtrack spline and have line masks for Vegetation Studio Pro generated for it. At 00:50 is the relevant part:

I modified the code a bit so that it's easier for everyone to add their own support for other assets.

I also invoke the Douglas Peucker algorithm to reduce the number of line mask segments. Just fiddle around with it to your liking.

Please note that this depends on code of a different asset and in order to keep the extensions work for everyone who don't have the asset you need to set a scripting define symbol TRAIN_CONTROLLER in order to activate this new feature. This is only used in my asset and hence a custom scripting define symbol.

 

oh snap, might have to grab that...looks pretty sick, thanks!

 

By the way, if you need this feature for a different asset, it should be fairly easy to extend yourself. Just open VegetationMaskLineExtension.cs and extend the enum:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. public enum DataSourceType
3. {
4.     Container,
5.     TrainController
6. }
7.  

Then open VegetationMaskLineExtensionEditor.cs and extend the switch statement with a call to your custom function which gets the positions you'd like to use, here:

Code (CSharp):

1.         /// <summary>
2.         /// Get the positions depending on the data source
3.         /// </summary>
4.         /// <returns></returns>    
5.         private List<Vector3> GetPositions()
6.         {
7.             List<Vector3> positions;
8.  
9.             switch ( editorTarget.dataSourceType)
10.             {
11.                 case VegetationMaskLineExtension.DataSourceType.Container:
12.                     positions = GetContainerChildrenPositions();
13.                     break;
14.                 case VegetationMaskLineExtension.DataSourceType.TrainController:
15.                     positions = trainControllerIntegration.GetTrainControllerPositions();
16.                     break;
17.                 default:
18.                     throw new Exception("Invalid data source: " + editorTarget.dataSourceType);
19.  
20.             }
21.  
22.             positions = VegetationMaskUtils.ApplyDoublesPeucker(positions, editorTarget.douglasPeuckerReductionTolerance);
23.  
24.             return positions;
25.         }

And of course create a new dedicated class for that. I like to keep things separate, that's why I moved the class outside of that editor class into a dedicated one:

Code (CSharp):

1. using System.Collections;
2. using System.Collections.Generic;
3. using UnityEngine;
4. using VegetationStudioProExtensions;
5.  
6. public class TrainController
7. {
8.     VegetationMaskLineExtension editorTarget;
9.  
10.     public TrainController(VegetationMaskLineExtension editorTarget)
11.     {
12.         this.editorTarget = editorTarget;
13.     }
14.  
15.     /// <summary>
16.     /// Positions are determined by the spline positions of Train Controller.
17.     /// </summary>
18.     /// <returns></returns>
19.     public List<Vector3> GetTrainControllerPositions()
20.     {
21.         List<Vector3> positions = new List<Vector3>();
22.  
23. #if TRAIN_CONTROLLER
24.  
25.         WSMGameStudio.Splines.Spline spline = editorTarget.dataSource.GetComponent<WSMGameStudio.Splines.Spline>();
26.  
27.         if (spline)
28.         {
29.             int steps = WSMGameStudio.Splines.SplineDefaultValues.StepsPerCurve * spline.CurveCount;
30.  
31.             for (int i = 0; i <= steps; i++)
32.             {
33.                 float t = i / (float)steps;
34.  
35.                 Vector3 position = spline.GetPoint(t);
36.  
37.                 positions.Add(position);
38.             }
39.         }
40. #else
41.             Debug.LogError("Train Controller selected, but scripting define symbol TRAIN_CONTROLLER isn't set");
42. #endif
43.  
44.         return positions;
45.     }
46.  
47. }

If you have questions, just ask

 

Yeps this is pretty freakin dope!!! Many thanks for the suggestion, I immediately love it lol

 

We just completed final editing to our latest video, "Apollo's Dream", and it will be coming soon to our YouTube channel.
Roland, thanks for the inspiration!

 

Video is now live!

I hope everyone enjoys it!
Music by Teresa Silverthorn

A special thank you to
@Rowlan , your videos and tools are an inspiration and great help to us all. Keep up the good work!

 

Quality work, really nice guys!
I'm upset I never found out what the orbs were, but asides that excellent!

Like the soundtrack, adds a tranquil feeling to everything

 

Thanks!
Much appreciated!
I think the orbs are on their way to Paris, they heard there’s a baby deer that needs help.

 

Apollo's Dream II is now live!
A ton of work went into this one, I hope everyone will enjoy it.
Creating beauty with Unity for a Virtual Experience with an original soundtrack is a lot of fun and I hope it shows in the video.

@Rowlan your tools help make these creations possible! Thank you for making other assets easier to use and sharing with the rest of us! We are all in your debt!

 

This is a Teaser for an upcoming project continuing the Apollo's Dream series.

The video was made with Unity 2019 using this asset.

 

Good day. After ensuring that I set up vegetation studio pro, such that I have no errors, When creating a biome using extensions I get no options, only an exclamation mark.

Vegetation Studio is added to scene, and the terrain has a unity terrain script attached.

Any hints on what is happening?

 

Never mind. Realized I needed to add the Vegetation Pro System first, and added it to the Biomes tab before any Biomes Marker could be processed properly.

 

New issue now. Clicking "clear and add" doesn't create any biomes
What could be the issue?
I also have no options to change Biome Type.

Is there a special Terrain Type required to be in the Vegetation Terrain tab beyond adding the Unity Terrain script?

 

To be precise, I see some bounding volumes when I click clear and add, but 0 trees grass etc
My terrain is exported from blender GIS (not the one seen in the image which is Unity's default terrain, for which the issue re occurs)

Any solutions?

 

I use it with Unity terrains without a problem. One issue I've run into is that the VSP plants are all off for runtime spawn.
Try this to check: Open the VSP "add batch functions"- same place as you went to open the mask spawner- and select to enable all in runtime spawn. I use the batch functions regularly while designing, to turn plants on and off to speed up the design process.
Other than that, I got nothing.
Good luck!

 

Sounds like runtime spawning is off for each plant.
the batch functions can turn them all on with one click so you can see them in the editor.

 

Nevermind.

After experimenting, I realized I had 0 prefabs for all objects in the Biome Editor.

After dropping in some prefabs the system works perfectly.

Got the system to work with my Blender GIS terrain (real world terrain) as well.

 

Glad you sorted it out. I wanted to toy around with Blender GIS terrain, but didn't have the time yet to get fully into it. Please do share some screens when you're finished. That's definitely an interesting topic.

 

Hey Rowlan!!

Since I didn't know how to mask non Easy3d Roads from vegetation (I used a process to get 3d map with road geometry that did not come from Easy3dRoads) I added CustomVegetationMask.cs and CustomVegetationMaskLine.cs to create customized initial bounds when CustomVegetationMaskLine is added to a Road section as shown in the video below (It looks like I may need to create a variety of CustomVegetationMask class files, to accommodate for variants in initial bounds height).

This is because varying initial bounds are required (i.e mask height for one stretch of long road may be okay for that road piece, but not okay for a shorter piece of road), and I don't know how to modify the mask height dynamically (not the mask width) which impacts the Node node creation/bounds of the line mask.

Features so far:

• 6880 real individual building locations from real world OSM Data of a reasonably large region

• real world road, power line, pools, sea etc of the same region in 3d based on OSM/GIS data

• Dynamic foliage/biomes of course from Vegetation Studio Pro. (With a custom grass fabric that I added from outside of Vegetation Studio Pro, along with a few simple tricks)

• AI traffic system

• Player car interaction system (gta-ish)

• Vehicle Deformation physics

Development time so far 12 painful days

 

Lol @Rowlan I realized all I needed to do was add VegetationMaskArea to each road tile, then hit the calculate hull button.

No need for my CustomVegetationMaskLine.cs, CustomVegetationMask.cs, and CustomVegetationMaskLineExtension.cs scripts

In my case, LineMask did not work, because my road's origin was far far away from where the 3d geometry of the roads actually were (which I would need to correct by going into blender for eg, and setting origin/geometry and re-export to unity3d, which I can't bother to do).

So MaskArea and auto hull combo worked well instead.

 

@Rowlan some gameplay featuring destructible/drivable cars

 

This video was made using this asset. @Rowlan , your extensions complete VSP!

Third in the Apollo’s Dream series, we make these for all people to find some peace and beauty in this world of chaos. We hope you enjoy it.

 

A later update to my GIS based open world /stealing/car jacking game, using VSP

 

Hey ! When I try to install this extension and use Biome Mask Spawner it gives me an error. Any help ?

 

I made an update to support a Vegetation Type Filter. Basically I needed it to find out which of the vegetation types wasn't instanced indirect and caused a weird camera effect. Solution in my case was to change Objects and Large Objects from instanced indirect to instanced.


The package structure got changed, so you need to delete the existing version in case you install this one. It's possible to have two versions installed though because I also changed the namespace.

 

Vegetation Studio Pro Extensions have been submitted to the Asset Store in order to reach a much broader audience. Thank you very much everyone for using this asset for free for years and thank you very much for your support!

I'll ask the moderation to lock the thread and will create a new one once the asset is live.