Interactive foliage or touch bending [wip]

hi there,

i just wanted to share the latest preview on the upcoming advanced foliage shader update bringing interactive foliage or touch bending next to procedural wind animation and advanced lighting:

webplayer

i hope you enjoy,

lars

 

tested the web player. Looks great. How expensive CPU wise is that? Does it still use the vertex alpha for bending etc ? Great wok

 

hi rosor,

thanks!
touch bending should not be a killer for the cpu as it only has to handle collisions and pass some variables to the shader.
the vertex animation (wind and touch bending) is completely done within the shader.
in fact i can not measure any real difference between touch bending enabled and disabled.

and yes: the shader still uses vertex colors (rgb) to control bending.

lars

 

Definitely adds a neat bit of realism. Can't help but imaging something coming towards you in the brush, and all you see is that brush or tall grass shifting. Nice!

 

thanks jc,
it definitely does ,-)

lars

 

Played the web player and i am impressed. I was expecting it to not run that well on my laptop but it only upped my CPU usage but 2-5%. good work what do you plan to do with this asset.

 

Pretty cool, some question
did it work with grass too?
how did it behave if the foliage is large foliage with large leaves (banana tree or something like that)

 

hi matt,

thanks. and indeed i am still surprised how fast it runs as well… .
the touch bending feature will be part of the next update of the advanced foliage shader suite and come to the asset store quite soon i hope.

lars

 

hi rea,
touch bending needs single game objects, so it does not work with any plants placed using the terrain engine.
i started this project by working on a more or less just shader based version (which also worked in conjunction with the terrain engine) but it turned out that it did not produce such convincing results (and was quite heavy as all vertices had to be calculated – no matter if touched or not).

so touch bending does NOT work with grass placed using the built in terrain engine (and i would always recommend to use a much easier solution to apply it to such simple geometry like grass).
but of course you can place some bigger and more complex grass models manually and apply touch bending to them.

hmm, the blackberry plant in the web player already is pretty large compared to the player’s size.
and if you take a whole branch of it as big "leave" it already shows how huge leaves might react.
anyway: you can define the stiffness, secondary fluttering and duration of the touch bending for each single game object aka plant independently: not only per prefab – although it would probably make sense… next to that vertex color red and vertex color blue of your mesh controls the amount of touch bending on the different parts of the plant. so you can make some vertices stick to the ground while others will bend like crazy when touched.
but you have to keep in mind that always all vertices will be bended, not only those which are really touched as collision is only detected per game object.

lars

 

This really impressed me. What kind of tweaks are you going to put into the user's hands? For example, will we be able to adjust /how/ the foliage bends? To what degree it bends? How long the animation lasts? Do you plan on adding some sort of layer/tag based collision detection feature so that the foliage can bend differently depending on what makes contact with it?

 

Great stuff as usual Lars. UT should hire you to revamp the whole terrain engine

 

hi failure,

thanks!

the user can tweak the touch bending animation per model using vertex colors and per game object setting up the script.

vertex colors
- blue defines the overall bandabilty and is also used for the wind animation.
- red shifts the animation phase as far as the wind animation is concerned and determines the maximum amplitude of the touch bending.



setting up the script
the touch bending script offers the following parameters that can be tweaked individually for each game object in your scene:
- bandabilty: low values will give you only little bending whereas high values will raise the amplitude.
- disturbance: amount of extra disturbance (like secondary wind bending) added to the plant while it is touched.
- duration: duration of the touch bending.

right now touch bending only takes the player’s direction and speed into account which will make the whole plant bend according to the parameters mentioned above. i might think about implementing some tweaks from my first version (which also considered the magnitude between player and vertex position) but that will not be part of version 1.
in case you need different touch bending animations like smooth swing back vs. high frequency shiver you can easily implement your own easing equation. so each plant can have its individual animation.

lars

 

thanks nipoco.
but i have to admit that touch bending will not work within the terrain engine but only on manually placed game objects…

lars

 

I see. It's still a fine and useful thing to have.

 

Nice, I was just hoping for something like this the other day!

 

hi there,

version 2.0 of the advanced foliage shader just has been released on the asset store.

get it here:
http://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/3253

or watch the latest demos:
terrain engine vs. single game objects:http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2...demoscene.html
touch bending: http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2...chbending.html

and follow the official thread:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/133398-Advanced-foliage-shader-released

lars

 

link seems to be broken.

 

you are right, thank you.
right one is: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/133398-Advanced-foliage-shader-released