Is Speedtree for Unity too restrictive ?

Hi forum, so I've been spending days trying to decide between SpeedTree and The Plant Factory... This thread finally kind of convinced me that TPF was a bit overpriced in regard to my needs, so I was about to decide for SpeedTree, BUT...

Their product description page insists heavily upon the fact that :
trees and plants created in the SpeedTree Modeler will operate only in Unity 5. Trees and plants cannot be exported as meshes or used in any other engine, rendering system or modeling toolset.

This sounds excessively restrictive to me : if I manage to create nice looking trees, chances are that, beside their regular use as runtime displayed vegetation in the game, I'll want to use them with e.g. Blender to prerender higher-quality stills or movies to be used as transition scenes in the game.

Is there a workaround to use SpeedTree creations as meshes?

More generally, does someone have informed advices about the choice between TPF and SpeedTree ?

 

Hey Leran,

The ability to export to blender for stills or transition scenes is worth considering.

Food for thought:

With SpeedTree, you get SpeedTree wind/LODs out of the box. It's easy to tune and it looks great. However, if you exported that mesh to anything else, you would lose that real-time wind animation and be left with static trees. So the question is, how much do you like SpeedTree wind. (Check out the built in SpeedTrees in the environment package for testing).

Secondly, if you really need SpeedTree for stills or transition scenes, consider SpeedTree Studio ($895). The EULA for Studio prohibits from being used in real-time projects, and it won't create LODs. So you would NOT be able to make trees in it for Unity.

But if you really wanted to do high quality pre-rendered transitions, Studio will give you access to the same tools used by Blizzard, ILM, MPC, for VFX work.

Obviously, that's a big price jump from $19 a month. But it's an option worth considering.

Hope that helps in considering what tree solution you go with! There are lots to consider and the important thing is that you use what's right for your project, be it static meshes, TPF, or SpeedTree!

 

Hey Dannyoakes, thank you very much for the insight ! I think I'll do as you say : get some basic speedtrees in my scene and decide how much I love the wind effects

That being said, there is still the case of Speedtree VS The Plant Factory (which reportedly does nice wind effects too but also allows to export models if need be). Allow my to summurize for science's sake...
1) Both have more or less the same functionalities (procedural generation, rigging, wind, LOD etc.)
2) TPF is quite a bit more expensive.
3) TPF seems to have a bigger and arguably better asset library - for example, when I see such beauty made exclusively with TPF I feel like crying. I spent weeks trying to model the same tree with Blender without even obtaining half as good a result... But those models are so big that they are disqualified for runtime display.

I suppose that it all boils down to the capacity of TPF to automatically build much lighter LOD meshes for its high-end models... Do you think that it would be possible for, say, this kind of tree, or would it be necessary to redo everything from scratch ? In which case I could as well forget TPF's nursery and model from scratch with Speedtree...

 

@Dannyoakes

So it's illegal to use in 2017.1 ? Best get updating your legal blurb.

Also Unity is used for making movies these days so ensure that the legal limitations do not affect Unity users, because then it can't be used in any cutscenes. I would guess a lot of people will simply choose not to use Speedtree in this case...

All game engines are moving toward supporting being general modeller/renderers (Otoy/Vray), so you will need to evaluate your conditions and terms. It is also possible to replicate blender with a few visits to the asset store.

I suspect it's all going to be fine but Unity 5 is a older product now, the same as 4 or 3. 2017.1 is the latest and 2017.2 is coming out soon. Perhaps the license should read Unity 5 or greater.

 

Yep, you're right, we do need to update those terms! Look for an update on that soon.

In terms of the Realtime vs Rendered in Game Engines/Movies in Games Engines. We absolutely support people using SpeedTree for these things. The distinction between real-time and non-realtime is as much about the tool being used as the final product. So if you render out a video of SpeedTree's in Unity and use it in your game, that's not breaking our EULA. If you make an animated series in Unity, that's also not a breach. SpeedTree for Unity is built for Unity.

SpeedTree Studio, however, is not licensed for use in Unity, or any other real-time application. There's a lot of fascinating overlap and I'm excited about where it's taking us!

Having never used TPF, I can't speak to its ability to create trees or LODs of trees. I'll let someone else speak to that!