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

I was thinking if I can make a forest in the background, forest that doesn`t need to interact with the player, a forest just for visual purposes in the background, but still to benefit from uNature's magic. If uNature applies for custom grass meshes, why it shouldn't apply for other items, such as bushes or trees (all meshes, not Unity terrain trees (no colliders, no wind, etc)

 

Ohhh ofcourse, I think it would work great but will need to check, will be home in a few hours and let you know

 

Cool. Fingers crossed.

 

What do You mean that RC is out ? Out to the testers or out to the asset store ?

 

Only for testers at the moment

 

I hope the asset store staff is fast after your upload and approves it until 15th December.

 

Me too
Will hopefully submit this weekend

 

Elroy, is it possible for you to have like a Trello roadmap or something similar so we can easily see upcoming and implemented features?

 

Yes absolutely, I was planning to do that weeks ago and forgot.

Will do that later today

 

Done.

https://trello.com/b/I4kqOpDC/unature

Will try to update the page as much as I can.
Integrations will hopefully be done today.


V1.1 looks a bit too empty, please put your suggestions on the "suggestions" card. (You can comment on it)

 

Hey guys -
Working on a demo now and a trailer, once that's done I will work on tutorials and documentation and release the asset

 

Can uNature accurately preserve positions and rotations for non-grass objects placed with other systems like Gaia and GeNa? For example if I place a bunch of scatter rocks or twigs using GeNa as GameObjects and I tweak a few things by hand to make it just right will uNature still be able to handle rendering those super fast while preserving the positions?

In the past I've used the Unity Terrain grass/detail system for placing/rendering these little scatter objects but the positions and rotations are very inaccurate and impossible to tweak by hand. Its not really a problem most of the time but I can get much better control with GeNa and want to make sure the results are preserved well.

Really looking forward to the release btw, great work so far

 

Uhm that's a really good idea, uNature for now is only for grass and stuff like that but your idea is really awesome, will put that on the roadmap ( support for dynamic gos)

 

I think thats a really good point. I always spawned Trees as Unity Trees with GAIA but because I want to use Growth Scripts and changing some trees manually I plan to spawn them as normal Prefab / GOs.
So it would be really great if uNature will work without any issues if using GOs on Terrain (like Trees, Stones) instead of Unity Terrain Trees / GOs.

Really looking forward to the release. Waited so long for it and now it's christmas time

 

Definitely, will look into that

 

@ElroyUnity I'm really excited about these framerates. I have a quick question about compatibility with Relief Terrain Pack. I know RTP is mainly about vertex painting, multi-uv terrain maps, and terrain shaders, so based on the bullet points of this, there doesn't seem to be any areas of conflict. Is there any way to test this against RTP to confirm, or can you anticipate any potential compatibility issues?

 

It will work 100% out of the box, cant see why not

I will test it just incase

 

Integrations update -

Gaia
GeNa
World Streamer
TC2
MapMagic - 80℅
uConstruct
AFS
InfiniGrass

 

When is the trailer gonna be ready?

 

I am actually getting the demo ready now, the whole trailer concept and editing is 80% done, so hopefully will finish the demo tomorrow and release the trailer on Monday (Will do my absolute best)

 

It's in print now Elroy!! You can't back down

 

if I already have grass on my terrain will I be able to convert it to Your system ? or I'll have to place it from scratch ?

 

Yes, you will be able to convert it by pressing 1 button

 

Ultra great news

 

MapMagic Integration is complete, I still need to refactor some issues in the core that I noticed while integrating map magic though

 

Does this work with SECTR? (streaming of course)

 

Didnt get the chance to check it but I suppose it should, and if not, there are 2 other streaming solutions integrated so it should give an example of how it should work.

Either way, I will make sure to add it to the next integrations poll .

 

Demo Sneak Peak



Terrain - TerrainComposer 2 (@eagle555)
Grass - SpeedTree (@Dannyoakes) and HQ Photographic Textures Grass Pack Vol.1 (@turboscalpeur)
Trees - SpeedTree (@Dannyoakes)
Water - Ceto (@scrawk)
Image Effects - Unity and Beautify(@Thrawn75)

Special thanks - @Dannyoakes and @eagle555

Note that this isn't the final result, will need to add a few more things and then release it

 

You really like to torture us, isn't it?

 

Looks good! Any way of comparing performance with the same scene using either uNature or out-of-the-box solutions?

 

Thanks
I will do a comparision with unity's rendering right now!
And I dont know if I can actually compare it to other solutions as I dont own many of them

 

[Test, using 9 different prototypes]

No grass painted at all:


uNature Grass:


Unity Grass:

 

After reading some of the discussion above regarding Unistorm and ICE, I can see some value in both integrations, but it depends on whether a game is intended to be realistic or a fantasy.

A storm should be subject to wind direction and velocity, and then so should trees and grass. If your weather pattern and grass/trees are expected to look natural, they should respond together, and with other game objects, too. I have a fort with an animated flag. My flag should correctly indicate the wind direction, and the asset I believe came with a light air and strong wind animation. So, I need one of my assets to carry these variables, and in a perfect world, they would be integrated.

I use ICE too. Many of my real animals can hunt on smell. Wind direction and velocity are important to my ai. Real wind has a chilling effect, which I can also make use of in ICE.

Much of the value of integration with uNature depends on uNature's design. Does the grass look different when it is wet? Does it move,at all or move differently based on wind or wind direction. In a fantasy game that does not rely on realism, it might not matter how uNature works, or integrates. Maybe a very modest integration is all that is necessary for Unistorm and ICE. I know I will try to use every uNature feature available.

 

The no grass painted examples are fantastic! Very realistic.

 

That is actually true, UniStorm will definitely be integrated but I am behind schedule as of now so I might integrate it on V1.0.5 or smth like that.

About the AI, yes, that's true, but that could also be done with the interactions system , the system is super modular and generic, you can literally do anything you want in it when it comes to the grass especially when I add per-grass raycasting on V1.1, I will add ICE to the next integrations poll either way .

 

@ElroyUnity could you tell me your specs? ~70 FPS with all those trees... I would get like 20-25 FPS in the first picture

 

GTX 970
I5 4460
and 16gb ram


Note that i am on full settings, you will be able to change that in the demo

 

I've got a AMD 8350 with 16GB RAM and a Radeon R9 270X and get around 60 FPS with only ~2600 Batches, 2.3M Tris/1.5M Verts and no grass at all at the moment.

Thanks to your screenshots, I really know that I need uNature

 

Haha

 

Release it, release it, release it, come on guys, join me
We are waiting for Your package so badly, come on, You are teasing us

 

Just a bit more! I promise

 

Elroy any updates? Still gonna release that video tomorrow?

 

Probably not the video, most likely the demo instead but can't guarantee, might just release the video depends on my progress tomorrow

 

Every day we will a pain in your ass
That happens to people who develop great tools But the demo would be cool. So I can test if the problem are really my specs or my project setup.

 

I've noticed in the demo a couple of things ->
using higher densities - uNature wins by a lot
using low densities - unity wins by 0.2ms depends on the areas (in the demo it means by 5 fps)

BUT that doesn't mean by any means that unity's grass is as fast as uNature, infact uNature solves some major issues like the mesh rebuilding (the spikes that happens when you move in the terrain/ modify it/ enable it), lots of features like the ability to choose an individual draw distance for each prototype (i've seen that requested a lot) and so much more.

uNature also has some custom features like normal maps support and I want to add translucency to it .


Either way you will see in the demo what I mean, uNature isn't called powerful for no reason

 

Demo?

 

Yep
Will be released tomorrow most likely

 

Dnyamic Terrains/ Multi-Tiling Support:The system comes with built-in support for dynamically loaded terrains without you needing to do anything!,

dose uNature support multi terrain with multiple lightmap baking?