[NEW PATCH] uNature - GPU, Interactable Grass. Interactable Trees, MultiThreading and more!

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Hey Everyone!

uNature is a new tool which handles two things, Grass and Trees.

On the grass aspect it completely replaces unity's grass and adds a ton of features to it! For instance:

• Very powerful, procedural grass mechanics (Draw anywhere you want on your scene, whether its a terrain or any kind of a surface without it affecting your performance)

• Supports color maps (read colors from the surface), dynamic surfaces and soon translucency

• Supports shadow casting, custom rendering layer for each prototype, LODs and individual wind setting.

• Works on the GPU and fully utilizes the power of the machine. Reducing all of the spikes that unity's grass has and allows instant grass modifications. Yes, That means NO MORE patch rebuilding!!!!

• Fully modular, can be customized to work on almost any scenario and can be used on any platform (didn't yet find a platform that it didnt work on)

• Copies from the terrain precisely and takes exactly 2 min to set it up in your project.

• Interactions (Touch Bending and more coming soon)

• Documented and an extremely clean code.

• Comes with a very clear documentation and API document.

But other than grass, as I mentioned above it also handles trees:

• Add any kind of an interaction to the trees on the terrain.

• Comes with a built-in "harvestable" tree instance script that works great.

• Super modular and can be extended.

• Integrated with UFPS, Photon Cloud, Photon Bolt, Forge Networking, UNet.

Pictures:

 

Saved for future posts

 

I'm curious to try this out. Does this work with SpeedTree trees or only with Unity's built-in Tree Creator?

 

Any kind of a model which is usable on the terrain
So yes

 

Then I wouldn't be opposed to giving it a try. We have quite a densely populated environment and I'm curious to see how it performs on our scenes.

 

Awesome
Make sure to send me a pm with the information above and i will add you

 

I'm curious about the difference in lighting. Is that also part of your system?
I mean...the second image just looks much, much better. Less washed out from light. Or is that just due to a different scene with different lighting, etc?

[Edit]
Also, the above shot shows more than double the cpu time. Any explanation for that?

 

Shouldnt be a difference in lighting probably because i took it at different times or something like that.
It could be caused by the system tho will check


Noticed that as well - will take a look,
Thanks for mentioning that

Elroi.

 

No more testers are needed, thanks for everyone!
Will be posting updates about new mechanics and features as i progress with the development!.


Elroi.

 

Just purchased. I'm excited to give this a try and see how much of an increase in performance I'll see.

 

Thanks for your purchase!
if you want to join the beta - message me with your skype .


The current asset store version is outdated and it isnt uNature. (You will get free upgrade when i release it)

 

Doing some initial testing with uNature while working on development of my Wetlands Stamps Pack for Gaia. By turning on pooling on the six speedtree models I'm using and turning on the grass management on the thick bed of @turboscalpeur's wetlands grasses from his HQ2 grasses pack, performance jumped from 20-30fps to 60-120fps on my crappy machine. Below is a screenshot of what pretty much the entire 2048x2048 terrain is filled.

Great job, Elroy! The addition of the grass management features that you are doing in addition to the pooling stuff is INCREDIBLE!



And yeah.. there are cattails but no water. I do my stamps development in 5.1.0 to maintain max Gaia compatibility. Unfortunately, none of the water systems I own work that far back without shader errors other than base unity water (which SUCKS).. So I save adding water to when I do session imports into 5.3.4. With water my 20-30fps would have been closer to 10fps if even that. So I'm sure I'd still be getting at least 60fps with uNature and water. On my machine that is rock star speed.. (I know, pretty sad... lol)

EDIT: Oh.. Forgot to mention. Just adding uNature scripts, setting to force tree pooling on the tree models, and turning on grass management is the ONLY performance thing I did. Nothing with LODs or any other type of performance tweaking. This is just bare uNature with Speedtree Desktop Trees 2 and HQ Grasses 2 from turbo freshly imported.

 

Thanks for sharing Shawn!!
Happy it works so well for you !

And that's just the beggining, i didn't even finish the grass management
So it will just get better

 

Some updates and new features announcements coming later today !

 

AWESOME!!!

 

A little update from the when i posted the original post -

• Cool new editors to manage the system, for example the settings editor : https://gyazo.com/3c278b1f35d37f2dbb6f74cc131f785b You can design as many LODs for the grass as you like!
• A custom uNature terrain data : https://gyazo.com/b2c3f05a1153870cc81e6f43e203da58 The system will automatically create a "layer" on top of the original terrain data and give you custom settings you can edit regarding the system, the terrain data persists through each terrain like a normal terrain data.
• TONS of bug fixing and improvments, both tree instances wise, and grass management wise. I made the system more generic so it fits on any terrain/ any shader, it works on any kind of a grass/ tree instance you put on the terrain. Grass management still isnt complete but the progress is amazing and it gets better and better!

Now for the interesting part, future plans! :

• Integration with many other system - I am hoping in the future to integrate it with InfiniGRASS, VolumeGrass and more in order to allow grass management on not only unity terrain's grass.
• Different kind of demos - possibly rocks harvesting, free roam examples of the grass management and more!
• More settings both in the terrain data, and settings editor.
• Maybe integration for non-unity networking libraries, like photon-server and more.
• Possibly add support for world-placed grass (very low priority atm)

Obviously there's more, but i dont want to ruin the suprise .
I am super open to your suggestions and what do u think this asset should include!,
Please don't be shy to tell me


Elroi!

 

Hi Elroi,

Fantastic asset this. Was wondering if it works well with Advanced Foliage System (top asset also). If not I would add it to the request/suggestions list if possible. . Would also suggest have everything up and ready to be plugged straight into TC2, gaia, etc.

One thing I noticed when having a play with cryengine5 the foliage on the demo scene I tested was mixed with some of it affected by the wind and their neighbours not. It wasn't really noticeable until you stop and study it. I imagine this takes some load off the system as well.

Edit - This was mainly on foilage meshes and not grasses and billboard types. At least not from what I can see.

 

Thanks!

Actually, i looked at "Advanced Foilage System" today but didn't have the chance to check it out, might do it tommorow and see how i can get it to work with the system

Yes, the system will work out of the box with any terrain-based system, also streaming/multi-tiling is fully natively supported with no extensions needed .

Yea thats true, will take a look at this as well .

 

All sounds good to me. forst makes some really good assets. He also does the custom tree importer but I am not sure if there is some overlap in the tools contained in AFS. Either way he is one of the stores longest running devs from what I can see.

 

Very impressive results. What will the final price be?

 

I thought I read somewhere 40 but I can't find it now. If it is then it's about $1 per fps gained the last time I tried it. Some are seeing more.

Edit - I know he said it is a free update to TMS owners so it's $20 now - more if you have to pay in euros

 

Alright, thanks for the info. Best pick it up soon then . Very nice price for such a big performance boost.

 

Final price will be somewhere around $40 .

Thanks!,
And it depends, its not like that on every machine .

Some machines gets litterally ~1 fps improvement and some are getting ~40-60 (like me) and some are even getting ~80.
It's still work in progress but the end result is that it will improve performance to everyone,
So i will keep posting updates as i improve it

 

Nvm, picked it up.

 

Keeping my eye on this

 

This looks really awesome for AAA terrains with dense grasses and Speedtrees.
Really looking forward to this!

Will you make a one week special offer or something like that if it's released or do you recommend to buy unature1 now to save money because of the free update? Just wondering

Keep up the good work!

 

Thanks for your support!

Thanks for your interest!
Will be sure to provide regular updates about how the asset is coming along .

Thanks!
Its definitely helping with performance on most machines, but i will aim to even make it better!
And yes there will be a special deal for the first week of release
Its your choice whether to buy TMS(uNature 1) now or wait for release because i still dont know what the special deal will be.

Personally if you aren't sure about this, i would say wait, there's no pressure

 

I've just purchased TMS and uConstruct.

 

Thank you!
I hope you will find both useful

 

@ephemeral life,

The unature beta version is a lot simpler to use than the current version of TMS. Takes a couple of minutes to set up at most if you happy with default settings. One thing to remember is if you are not going to use the tree felling option turn it off. Don't know if intentional but when I switched it off it ran even faster.

 

I appreciate the tips . Tbh I won't be able to use this tool for at least another year, but I know I will benefit greatly from it since I intend to use heavy vegetation for my scenes. That along with the insanely cheap price and I had no choice but to get it .

 

It is definitely a lot easier hehe

Worked hard to make sure its both simple and supports multi-tiling straight out of the box

Happy you like so far!.

And that's a weird one - will take a look why it has some kind of an overhead ,
Thanks!

 

Thought it was normal Glad to inadvertently report it.

 

Hehe

 

Do you have a performance comparing infinigrass and your system? In theory they are for the same thing (on grass).
Also, any chance you could create an apk to run this on android? Just curious if it would make grass finally usable on mobile, because any dense grass on mobile kills it using the default system.

 

Thanks for your interest!

The cool thing about the system is that it doesnt use any custom shader, that means it could work basically on anything, and could be integrated into any grass shader.

So while i never tried infinigrass i can say that if integrated correctly they could both work together, and that means that the perf increase will be huge .

That's a good question actually - i will try and see if i can get a little android demo running and post some news later on on how it performs .

 

This will be a totally new package sale or you will use the same package that is currently in the Asset Store and only change the name?

Because if it is a new product, I'm wondering how will you give free upgrade for those who have already purchased uNature1.

And you already have an estimated time for the release?

Thank you!

 

I think he has said a few times that Trees Manager System will become uNature. So I'm assuming he will just do a name change of Trees Manager System and update the price with uNature is ready for release maybe?

 

Yea it will be the same package but i will change everything in it
I dont have any estimated date but i think in 3-4 weeks at most if everything goes well

 

Tests, even this early in the game, are going pretty well.. Even on my crappy computer... heheh

 

@Shawn67 and @ElroyUnity

Thanks for the info! I asked this because if it were a new package I would wait until the release, so I'll buy this weekend to go familiarizing myself with the tool.

PS: I do not mind paying more for updating. My scene will have multiple biomes and thus a lot of vegetation. So I think your asset will be very useful, even if it is to win a few performance frames I believe will have been worth it.

 

Hehe thanks

My pleasure man!
Thanks for your purchase and although some people wouldn't mind paying a bit for an update i promised i wont make you guys pay anything extra .


And trust me it will be way more than few frames

 

To give you an idea, my computer is in sore need of update. So don't get scared by these numbers. But with grass settings set to 250 detail distance, 1 detail density, 10 different grass detail textures, and six different speedtree species while running Suimono, Tenkoku, Beautify, HBAO, and Volumetric Fog & Mist I was lucky to see 6-7fps on Unity 5.3.4. After adding uNature's component to my player and terrain, turning on grass management, creating my sector and pooling my fps jumped to between 15 and 20. Disabling Suimono it jumped to between 30 and 40. This is an older machine that is still crutching along with an old GT-610 shared ram video card and an AMD processor (which I'm told doesn't perform as well in gaming environments).. And this is in the editor. I haven't done a build but I'm sure it would increase more without having the editor overhead. But imagine how that would be on a decent machine.

In my 5.1.0 build environment for my stamps packs. Just plain Unity sky and no water I saw jumps from 30-40fps without uNature to anywhere between 80-120fps with it. I'm half wondering if there is something screwed up in Unity 5.3.4's engine since there is that big of a jump between the two.. Of course it could also be that my 5.1.0 project is fairly empty whereas my 5.3.4 one has all of my stamps packs and a lot of other assets installed since I use it for testing.

 

That's awesome!
Will definitely look into the 5.3.4 thingy, seems pretty weird

Also try the latest version i uploaded at the group should increase performance by 200% - 300%

 

Forgive me if this sounds like a silly question, But will uNature work with mesh based terrains? and trees that I paint on with tools like quick brush.

 

Hey!

No that's not a silly question at all!, been asked that many times .
Unfortunately as of now there is no support to mesh-based terrains, maybe in the future, but i don't think it will be implemented in the initial version, sorry .

I will post an update on this thread when i get to work on that though, so make sure to check the thread once in a while .

 

Heheh.. Unfortunately, the 5.3.4 numbers I quoted WERE with the latest version you shared with beta group today. I really think something is flaky with 5.3.4. I'll have to load my 5.1.0 project I used when developing the wetlands stamps pack and load the latest uNature beta into it and see if I still get the crazy high numbers that I got last week.. heheh

 

Oh, will definitely look into that then

 

We're just finishing up with the first pass of integrating uNature 2.x and Landscape Builder.

What custom settings do people want to configure when adding uNature to multiple terrains in a landscape?

 

it might be a good idea to set level of pixel errors by distance?