Landscaper - A tool for procedural foliage placement

4.6.5 Pro

 

It looks like Unity has made some changes to their API between 4.6 and 5.0 then. I can't work on Landscaper until tomorrow, but I'll get it working with Unity 4 by this time tomorrow.

 

Thanks a lot dude. You don't know what it's like to have invested so much time and money in Unity 4 Pro just to have them give everything out for free. Then the one-two punch is because U5 is free, it seems like every freaking developer on the marketplace is targeting it exclusively now. They basically threw us under a bus.

 

If a package isn't compatible with Unity 5, it'll be removed from the Asset Store sometime in the future; packages that haven't been submitted with Unity 5 also aren't eligible for sales. Since it's a pain in the ass to juggle multiple copies of a package for different versions, most people will just stick to the newest one. I'm not going to maintain two separate packages for Landscaper, but I'll try to keep the 5.x version compatible with Unity 4 as much as possible.

Version 1.1.0 (Beta) - Download
- Tree creator trees no longer appear black when placed as Terrain Trees
- Generation times are greatly reduced for larger terrains; FoliageAreas have a "MaxTileSize" which splits the area into multiple generation chunks for further improved performance.
- The FoliageArea inspector now has options for auto-fitting to the scene: All Geometry, Terrain, and Selection
- Foliage instances placed using the GameObject method are no longer hidden in the hierarchy and are instead parented to a new empty GameObject named "Landscaper Foliage"
- Placed foliage is no longer automatically cleared when the FoliageArea component is removed
- FoliageArea now has an optional layer mask to filter which surfaces instances can be planted on
- Species now have a list of terrain textures that they are allowed to grow on. If the list is empty, instances can grow anywhere. Has no effect when planting on non-terrain GameObjects
- [NEW] Landscaper is now compatible with Unity 4.6.x, and possibly older versions as well


There are two things to note if you're using Landscaper with 4.6:

1. Terrain trees apparently just can't have a rotation at all in Unity 4, so all terrain trees will face the same direction - there's nothing I can do about that. I don't know why Unity thought this was a good idea.
2. The auto-fit helpers don't work due to a bug in Bounds.Encapsulate() that wasn't fixed until Unity 5. I could possibly work around this by writing my own Encapsulate() method, but this isn't in the current version.

 

By any chance, does your asset paint grass objects (not detail meshes) on a mesh? Probably not, but thought I would ask since it would save me from purchasing another asset as well.

Yeah, I noticed that recently when placing some trees. Weird, huh? The solution for Unity trees has always been to take the fbx into a modelling program, rotate it and make a new mesh/prefab. Not sure how to do it with Speedtrees. I have their modeler software so will try that.

Thanks for the updates.

 

I've been testing the 4.6 version that was just uploaded and it works just marvelously... If there were a grass option available as well, I think it would be an absolute top seller!

 

Not at the moment, unfortunately. I'm hoping to eventually have a solution for grass and very small detail objects similar to what Epic are doing in Unreal Engine - placing the meshes at runtime in an area around the player, rather than trying to store position/rotation/scaling of potentially tens of millions of instances on a large terrain. I wouldn't count on this being implemented any time soon though, I'm still not sure exactly how I'm going to do it.

 

Great idea! I bet you figure it out.

 

I was just thinking about this.
Lumion3D for architecture has a grass shader that does something like this.

 

About the Unity Terrain trees always rotated the same... I always assumed it's related to the billboards it has to turn them into in the distance. If every instance of the same tree has the same rotation then it can just throw up the same billboard texture of that tree. Something like that.

I'd give the Unity developers the benefit of the doubt on that one, cause it would be a pretty dumb decision if it wasn't necessary.

What bothers me more is how the detail objects don't align to the surface normals. So they're no good for small rock or plant clusters. Something I've been using this Landscaper tool for with great success. But yeah if you could figure something out with a grass placement method similar to the Unity terrain one, that would be amazing.

 

What the fun thing is that the new LOD or speedtree terrain placement that actually has rotation will not work with terrain trees. Have LODs and billboards setup and then the bending will not work. Kind of wrong to keep tree creator users from using this feature. Can at least use AFS trees with the LOD placement.

 

Version 1.1.0 is out of beta and has made it to the Asset Store. As a reminder, here are the full release notes:

Version 1.1.0
- Tree creator trees no longer appear black when placed as Terrain Trees
- Generation times are greatly reduced for larger terrains; FoliageAreas have a "MaxTileSize" which splits the area into multiple generation chunks for further improved performance.
- The FoliageArea inspector now has options for auto-fitting to the scene: All Geometry, Terrain, and Selection
- Foliage instances placed using the GameObject method are no longer hidden in the hierarchy and are instead parented to a new empty GameObject named "Landscaper Foliage"
- Placed foliage is no longer automatically cleared when the FoliageArea component is removed
- FoliageArea now has an optional layer mask to filter which surfaces instances can be planted on
- Species now have a list of terrain textures that they are allowed to grow on. If the list is empty, instances can grow anywhere. Has no effect when planting on non-terrain GameObjects
- Landscaper is now compatible with Unity 4.6.x, and possibly older versions as well. Though the auto-fitting options don't work in 4.6 right now.

 

Have a couple more request. These are not 'if you do not do this I am going to be upset' request just it would help request.

-When placing terrain trees a color variation option. Speed trees have an automatic color/hue variation I think but tree creator trees get it from the tree placement settings.

-Do not think this is doable but here it is anyway. Placement option based on each child and not whole species. Making the terrain tree and gameobject option available for each child. For example I would use this for placing terrain trees and having the sapling of the tree placed as a AFS touch bending gameobject. So it will look natural spawning around its parents.

 

The first one should be easy enough to do. Your second request is a little trickier, but it's doable. I'm hoping to have them both in for the next major version (1.2), which is shaping up to be the next release as long as there are no bug fixes to do before then.

On the topic of new features, I've put up a public roadmap for Landscaper here.

A quick warning about the roadmap:
The roadmap is just for an idea of what I'm planning, it's not a concrete list of upcoming features. I'm working on Unity assets in what little spare time I have, so even features tagged as "High Priority" might not be done for a while (or even at all). I just don't want to get people's hopes up about any specific feature they read on the roadmap - until it appears in the "Beta" list, don't rely on a feature being implemented. That said, I'll always deal with bug fixes as soon as possible.

 

Thanks for the info and the road map. Great ideas in there.

 

Here's the new beta version. There are some breaking changes due to archetypes replacing simple prefabs, so you'll need to redo some of your settings if you're upgrading to 1.2 on an existing project, sorry.

Version 1.2.0 (Beta) - Download
- There is now an option to place a Foliage Area from the menu, under "GameObject > Landscaper > Foliage Area"
- Prefabs have been replaced with "Archetypes", which group certain options with the prefab itself
- Placement mode can now be chosen on a per-archetype basis, rather than for an entire species
- Archetypes have a scale range which is used to adjust the scale of foliage instances based on their generation. It's no longer necessary to specify generation overrides in order to control scale
- Added a colour variation option to archetypes, allowing for foliage instances to be randomly darkened to add variation
- Generation overrides now also use archetypes for increased control
- Generation overrides can be individually disabled. For example: if you wanted to override generation 1, but not generation 0, you can do that now
- Greatly improved usability when editing foliage species
- Each species can now consist of multiple prefabs which will be selected from at random


Note on experimental Landscaper script
I've left some files in this beta release for a future feature I'm working on, the detail object placement system. It's nowhere near finished, so I'd strongly advise against trying to use it for a production project. A lot of the settings aren't exposed to the editor yet, there's no control over where detail objects are placed (they're even spawned on top of existing trees), and it's not suitable for placing thousands of instances (for things like grass, for example). It's mostly just a proof of concept at this point, but if you want to play around with it, just add a "Grass Placement" script to your player character and set the "Temp Prefab".

 

That object placement script is very nice, very promising. I'm using it for the grass in this picture. It's a 60m radius of grass clusters around the player, each about 4m wide. I've got it updating every 2 seconds.

That's a 2km terrain, which is what's cool, the terrain size is irrelevant, it's planting detail wherever you go at runtime. I love it

 

This is awesome. I have added it to wishlist, and will purchase with next round of unityassets. Congrats.

 

Really cool. Will have to try it out soon.

 

Version 1.2.0 is now available on the Asset Store. Here's a reminder of what's new:

Version 1.2.0
- There is now an option to place a Foliage Area from the menu, under "GameObject > Landscaper > Foliage Area"
- Prefabs have been replaced with "Archetypes", which group certain options with the prefab itself
- Placement mode can now be chosen on a per-archetype basis, rather than for an entire species
- Archetypes have a scale range which is used to adjust the scale of foliage instances based on their generation. It's no longer necessary to specify generation overrides in order to control scale
- Added a colour variation option to archetypes, allowing for foliage instances to be randomly darkened to add variation
- Generation overrides now also use archetypes for increased control
- Generation overrides can be individually disabled. For example: if you wanted to override generation 1, but not generation 0, you can do that now
- Greatly improved usability when editing foliage species
- Each species can now consist of multiple prefabs which will be selected from at random


There's no change to the detail object placement system yet. The scripts are available in 1.2.0 but are still marked as experimental and are not meant for production use; there's going to be a lot of changes to the system before it's ready.

Also, I forgot to update the QuickStart guide video for version 1.2.0 before submitting, so the video on the Asset Store page is obsolete. Here's the updated guide video:

 

Hello Sir @AegonGames !

Im a Another Happy customer ^^

Its so amazing you brought us Unreal tecnology to unity xD
Im Still testing this tool ...

( And you will excuse me .. but this product Has so many possibilities .. that reaaly Stimulate our Imagination )

I want to do Also some "nature take over" and "ruins" kind of architecture Placemnt ...

SO ... Is it Possible Somehow ( latter in the roadmap ) us have "Splines " to Indicate More Precisely were the Various Archetipes and Biomes grow ?

As the "Megascater" Tool does ... With a bit of "Shruberry" Hand placemnt too ...

Lets Imagine the Ancient Enviroment : https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/8746



Landscaper Would Doing this more precise scatering for example ...

With Spline groups with many colors by hierarchies ...
( ... many splines draw across the Terrain or Large object that define each sub archetipes )

- A First Spline Would Put a row of Walls and Ruins and pillars Scatered .. Exactly were we want along Those splines ...

Then Over those Archetipes ... chose some more Plants and Species to grow "over" and along the first objects Placed ..

Then we can mix a bit of Sruberry Asset and allow us to "paint" new Splines "over" already Placed Geometries...

Then go further with Some more splines For hiper detailing Growth ...

For example : We have the walls and alot Fauna Trees and flora growing around ...
( So we just paint some splines on the surface of the walls ... And now we can Scatter Moss that grows from those splines Along the Walls on a natural growing way taking acount the surface topology .. )

Making this way The foliage Placemnt Act as good for "micro Placemnt" System with custom brushing Splines that Stick On top of geometries.. and Guide the growing "as masks" already do ...

INTERFACE Wise would be just to get us a "painting Sticky splines" Script ... to act as mask And orientation placemnt ...

Would be cool We have a Simplier More Intuitive "All in one place" interface were we just drag "prefabs"
( That are in a Tree hierarchy So we know Visually Wich are the Prefabs growing over What )

If you check Simple LOD : it has avery cool drag and drop items in a tree interface
And on those Would be cool to add with some Sliders that Would Put the Min and max Intensities of populated objects



OR if you dont want to code it from the ground ... Here is a candy for you ^^

On a interface wise there is also a cool hierachies scripts That is OPENSource free called HyperView : https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/4975




I KNOW ITS QUITE A ADVANCED STUFF Im dreaming and Visualizing here ...
Its Almost like "Eon vue Ecosystems" But with Painting Splines even better ...

But maibe that "painting splines" That Stick to geometries be in giant Landscapes or reaaly Small micro Detailing ...
Maibe is not that dificult to code or that Impossible ? ...

I mean MegaScatter already uses a splines system much like it .. I own mega Scatter and its greath ...

But a Combination of Painting Splines Like crazy Around and "Natural foliage placemnt" Along those
Would be just a BLASTING Amazing no other engine alike thing ^^

PS: this painting Splines that stick to geometries to define Folliage Scatering ... Would be Also greath Adiction To be added into DUNGEN or in this system ... If this Splines ( beside painting them ) Would Also grow Organicly ...

Be trough a Whole landscape ... Or just a Object or just a small part of it ...
Each Spline would define the Main path .. then Around Its Ecosystem .

Now imagine this System also Working Not just On landscapes but with Dungen ... After Dungeons generation .
It would be a Complete crazyness to watch a Whole landscape from dungens to all enviroment outside
Just Grow procedurally Trough "ivy" lines paths .. That we can also paint around ^^


I know This things might take one year to develop or something .
But Comming from the Creators of the amazing DUNGEN

We can expect the procedural sky be the limit ...

THANKS SO MUCH FOR LISTENING !

3DLABS

 

Sorry for the really late reply on this one, I must have missed the forum notification somehow..

Those are some great ideas; the spline-based biome placement I think is especially important. Like you said, it's a lot of work so it might be a while before I can find the time to work on it, but these are features that I'll definitely look into implementing in Landscaper.

 

Hi, what is the difference between using this and Terrain Composer, many thanks. Wondering if I need to purchase this app

 

I don't know a whole lot about Terrain Composer, but I'd say it definitely has a broader scope than Landscaper does.

From what I can gather, you wouldn't gain much by purchasing Landscaper if you already own Terrain Composer; the only thing I can think of is that Landscaper's foliage placement was designed to mimic forest expansion (see this part of the video), so you can have more naturally clustered foliage - but then again, I can't say how placement is handled in Terrain Composer so it's difficult to compare.

Hopefully, someone who's used both can chime in and point out the differences.

 

I have not gotten too deep into Terrain Composer. I have spent more time with it then with Landscaper but have not done much with it. Landscaper is very powerful. Once you get used to it, which should not take long, you can make amazing forest. Everything from rocks on the beach to large kapok trees in the mountains, which then spawn kapok saplings.

I think Terrain Composer is a very powerful tool but to do what Landscaper does with forest placement would take many hours. The thing is Terrain Composer does more than just forest placement. If you can the best thing really is to work with both. Though I would definitely stick to Landscaper for forest placement.

 

I was unable to place grass with Landscaper. I could place prefabs, including mesh details, but not simple 2d grass.

 

Thanks for good honest information

 

hi here
about mobile we got some optimisation ?

 

Sorry, I'm not a mobile developer; I can't comment on Landscaper's mobile performance and I don't think I'll be making any mobile-specific optimisations.

 

oh ;( bad news

 

Hi, I was wondering if this allows you to choose what slope your textures can be generated on. Is it possible with landscaper?

 

Hello,

I would be interested in your asset.

I ask myself a question, does it work with on a sphere?

Thank you,

Regards,

Grieve for my english I'm french.

 

Just played with it. The only thing keeping this from working is the max slope is limited at 90. So can not get it to work on a sphere right now. Sure AegonGames can get it to work though.

 

Unfortunately, Landscaper won't work on a sphere.

It might be a feature I implement at some point in the future, but I can't make any promises. My first reaction was "Yeah, I can do that!", but adding support for a sphere looks deceptively simple; There are a lot of underlying systems that need to be changed to accommodate a new feature like that.


For anyone interested in tackling the problem themselves, here are the problems I can think of:

1. Landscaper works by casting rays downwards. To work with a sphere, it would need to cast rays towards the centre of the sphere.
2. A lot of the optimizations are heavily grid-based. They'd likely need to be completely overhauled for use with a sphere.
3. I'm using euclidean distance to determine how far away foliage instances must be from one-another. You'd probably want a more sphere-friendly coordinate system instead.

 

Hi,

I've got a feature request concerning the GrassPlacement script.

Would that be possible to add a "Grass Texture Mask" like the "Terrain Texture Mask" in the species script to prevent the grass to be spawned everywhere ?

Thanks

 

I wanted to ask if Landscaper looks for height specifically, right now I'm toying around with a flat terrain and despite the fact that the gameobjects I assigned spawned perfectly, the trees themselves don't show despite the amount of time the simulation took how mow much it said would be created.

Also, as for the terrain composer questions/comments, let me say that as someone who uses TC, the terrain gen is great inside TC, but I still bought landscaper because I believe by videos and screens etc. it would be a better asset for world decoration.

 

Hey TheXWolf,

Make sure the trees are set to spawn below 0 height. Also make sure that the terrain has tree draw enabled. I have spawned trees on a flat terrain so it should work.

 

Default settings on species are -1000 - 1000 terrain is flat at 0, also tried with terrain flattened at 20.
Terrain does in fact have tree draw on and went into playmode to be sure.

 

Just did a test and did have this problem. What worked for me was scaling the Foliage Area by the y axis to 50. It then planted the trees.

 

Already assumed that was an issue so first set the height to 150 and placed it at 75 so be on ground, nada;
then set the height scale to 150 and placed at 50. Generated 1196 instances, yet nothing visual. (Triple checked tree draw.)

Update: So I tried the trees that come with unity, the speed tree models. Those sadly work, for some reason I can't get prefabs or .fbx to work with Landscaper. Set up as gameobjects instead of terrain trees and that works, naturally slows things down a bit but that might be the only way to do that.

 

It's a shame the developer walked away from this asset - Like so many others, it had a lot of potential.
Me, i never was able to use it much because of the fact that you could never place trees with more than 1 generation, because any time landscaper placed more then 20,000 trees, it placed them all as billboards somehow.

 

If you ask the developer for help he will get back to you with help on a bug since this is not abandoned. It is not being updated currently but if there is a problem I am sure he will get back to you.

For your problem I am not sure. Currently I have my Foliage Area spawning 4 Generations which creates about 200k trees, plants. Works amazing! I have gone crazy and went up to 5 gen which was around 700k I think. Took a while but It worked. Only problem I have faced similar to what you were saying was when I place many LOD trees the LOD system started to freak out and was showing different LOD levels at random distances. So I would come across a billboarded plant that should be LOD0. This was because of Unitys LOD system though. Guess it just can not handle nearly 1 million gameobjects.

 

Landscaper isn't abandoned, I just haven't had the time to add new features recently (the vast majority of my time has to go towards game development and the remainder is pretty much taken up with support). I'm still around to fix bugs and offer support. We're not using Landscaper for our own projects right now so I can't know about any problems that aren't reported and this is the first I'm hearing of the billboard issue.

I'll take a look at spawning a large number of trees to see if I can reproduce the issue. If it's an issue with Landscaper, I'll try to get it fixed as soon as possible but it might just be a Unity thing unfortunately. Landscaper doesn't handle LOD transitions at all, it just places the objects and lets Unity's scripts do their thing.

 

I was able to somewhat reproduce the issue when generating on a very large terrain. I had 86,000 foliage instances and about 1/4 of them were perpetually stuck in billboard mode. It looks like these were the ones that were placed last.

Whatever's limiting the number of trees that are rendered at higher LODs seems to be per-terrain though. I placed a smaller terrain above a patch of trees that were affected and all of the trees planted on that new terrain were fine (I messed up the billboard material to make it more visible):



So it looks like there's some sort of limit on the number of terrain trees each terrain can handle before it just stops bothering with LODs. I haven't been able to find any information on a documented limit to the number of trees a Unity terrain can handle but then I don't think many people are spawning 20k+ trees.

If my theory is correct, you should be able to work around the issue by splitting the terrain into smaller parts.

 

This is not an issue I have come across with the exception of trees spawned as game objects. I was able to optimize my tree spawns both in geometry and as terrain trees, in the case of my forest area generating 12k+. I do know that unity itself has an issue with scenes having over a certain number of meshes on screen at once.

 

I'm glad you were able to reproduce the issue.
Unfortunately there's just no way i can "split up" the terrain any more than it already is, because we're already talking 5x5 25 tiles, and since Unity is ten years behind the rest of the world when it comes to terrain and foliage already, the more seams = the more your game world terrain becomes uneditable.

They're all speedtrees with 3 LOD stages, the last being the billboard.

 

What version of Unity are you guys using? 5.4?

I am using 5.3.2 and tested placing 5 generations which estimated 1 million trees but really placed 50K trees, plants. Also went through the terrain with the tree brush set to maximum painted many more plants. All using 3-4 LODs with a billboard for the last. All these trees, plants are on a single 500*500 terrain.


LOD levels blend in at the appropriate distance.

 

Lots of questions would be required to get a real idea of your situation though. First and foremost, are these Speedtrees and most importantly, are they all using colliders? Because the current theory is that Unity's "crapping out" when you try and place lots of trees is because you're placing a lot of colliders also, and if you aren't doing that, obviously you won't have these issues.

 

They are not SpeedTrees but are imported using Custom Tree Importer. So they use the SpeedTree LOD setting for the smooth LOD transition and use a SpeedTree billboard with a custom shader.

They are using colliders. Capsule Colliders. Even the small Palmettos palms. When I was using the 100k+ placement with plants the plants did not have colliders of course.

Little surprised because have noticed almost everything being broken with the terrain but SpeedTrees. If it was not for @larsbertram1 and @AegonGames I would not even dare use the Unity terrain.

 

No one answered about version of Unity being used. If there is another terrain bug being introduced in 5.4 I am not going to update. Is this problem showing up in 5.3?