[Old] Tropical Forest Pack

I have not used this method. With GI pre-computed on the terrain and some playing with the skybox, ambient values I am sure you can get a decent feel with very little directional light if any at all in a very thick rain forest without shadows. Though it would have to be so thick you can not even see the sky.

The last few screenshots I have shown above are on the demo scene terrain(500m*500m) with over 70,000 trees. It is too the point that the Unity terrain is freaking out because it can only support 65k trees. The trees are mostly the dwarf palmettos, cupuacu, jatoba and palms. Only three kapok in the scene.

I am using a GTX 960m laptop. Getting around 30fps on very high(Lod bias lowered to 1 and shadow distance raised to 300). Disabling shadows does raise it to around 50fps and effectively cuts the drawcalls by more than 50%.

Problem with the version out now is that the treecreator shader becomes super specular when you lower the directional light and you would have to if you shutoff the shadows. 1.1 update will work with this but the current 1.01 would require AFS tree creator optimized shaders if you were to lower the directional light.

 

One thing I have been thinking about is how to get a nice thick ground cover in Unity. Just does not seem possible.

Gameobjects- Slow Unity drastically
Terrain Trees- Limited number of trees can be placed so no room for ground cover
Detail- Hate the terrain detail system. Know it can look better with AFS detail setup but still do not like using the detail tools

The answer is a dynamic placement of gameobjects around the player. Know this can be done but I am not a programmer. So will have to figure this out down the road.

Really though I will probably have to supply the models with a smaller demo scene. Leave it to the developers to get it working best in different scenarios.

 

Here is my attempt at a dense forest. I reduced the main light of the leaves from the default white to a dark green which gets around the problem of the specular brightness in low-level light. Although it definitely needs further tweaking, I'd prefer the trees a little lighter than what I've got them here although should be able to do it by adjusting the main colour of the branches.

I was able to get a solid 30fps with 15,000 trees in a 1x1km space, which would have been simply impossible using shadows especially on my laptop. I think having some sun light shining through is ok, I think I overdid the bloom, but it can easily be a cloudy day and therefore people wouldn't really expect shadows. In any case, the direct light is usually blocked by the mid-height trees.

In fact this scene got a faster FPS than your highly optimized demo scene, the shadows take a ridiculous chunk out of the performance and I believe after a lot of experimenting it could look great without shadows. Not having shadows allows for more ground cover as well. Would be interesting to see somebody else having a go at a dense forest as well to exchange tips and ideas.

I personally don't like the detail grass either, although I've experimented with small leafy plant textures and it looked ok. I think the new version of Terrain Composer allows for dynamic placement of game objects around the player, although not sure how easy it is to set up, I'm not a programmer either.

 

Came out nice. Think the bloom was good. Would be strong with eyes adapting to the dark forest floor. Only problem is the leaves being black except for the papaya.

It does definitely have a much more rain forest feel. Really nice. Also nice turtle.

 

I just checked the Papaya and realised I'd forgot to change the main colour from white to a dark green which is why it stands out too much. I think the key is to change the main colours in the materials, this was my first attempt so I'll try a few different colours in the future. The turtle is the red-footed tortoise from this 5-turtles pack by Junnichi Suko. He's just released this great iguana for free today as well, definitely worth checking out.

 

Got an error on install, I'm using 5.4 and cinematic image effects pre-release asset.

"The namespace 'Smaa' could not be found ..."

Any ideas, install also removed the SMAA effects from the Cinema pack on my cameras. Any thoughts?

Textures don't seem to be applied to the trees either.

Thanks

 

I remember having this problem as well. I think the solution was to not import SMAA from the demo folder.

 

Thx, I'll try it out.

 

Sorry for the late response. Thanks @jonfinlay . Yeah I would say keep the SMAA out when importing. I will not have it in the update since Unity's Builtin effects are doing the job.

Sorry for anyone having problems in 5.4. Not sure when the official release is coming but now the new shading for 1.1 is broken in 5.4 so will wait for the betas to be done.

 

Hey Baldinoboy, what are you working on at the moment?

 

Hey The Seawolf,

I have been quite occupied by work and life that I have almost nothing to announce. Very sorry for this guys. This is not abandoned but just on hold. Do have a few things to show though:

Took photos of a lot of tropical foliage while in a tropical area. Most is still unprocessed but here is a sample of some-

http://imgur.com/i3woOZQ

So textures are getting better. I have to ask though. Do you guys want more performance or more quality? I have a 4096 foliage image containing all the ground foliage textures. I can get the banana leaves in this to have less draws or I can have the larger plants as separate higher-res textures, materials. Neither will be more mobile ready but if you want to be using something like SEGI(works amazing by the way) or Vive any performance that can be saved should.

Also, which is funny why you messaged today, I just finished processing(making seamless) a photoscanned ForestGround texture-

http://imgur.com/4gis1GW

It is an 8K seamless photoscanned material. About 3m² of ground photographed. Almost 140 images. Photoscan rules ! Already photographed a few different surfaces like rock, cliff, and rocky runoff. They still need to be processed though. So using RTP or the new version of ats coming out you can get some real displaced surfaces! Looks great with just the diffuse and normal too. A lot better than the grassy ground currently included.

So after finishing these ground textures up I will go back to focusing on the trees and plants.

 

For me I would say performance is key, Really nice asset! Thanx Bro

 

Great to see the progress. I would opt for quality, especially separate meshes for fruit hanging from trees, so that can fall or be taken by the player. The reason I prefer quality is that I've found after many attempts that when using your forest prefabs I can get excellent results without using shadows. In fact I released a little experimental game using your models, which got picked up by on a stream. The game itself sucks, but when I watched the original stream there were a huge amount of positive comments regarding the graphics, so the fact that shadows were not used seemed not to be a problem whatsoever. What I would prefer more than anything, however, is that the trees (especially the leaves) didn't become white when there is no directional light used. This doesn't happen to other trees I have, just seems specific to your package and not quite sure what the cause is. In any case, really looking forward to the next update, but don't feel you have to rush it.

 

Thanks for the feedback guys. Congrats on the release @jonfinlay . What project did you release?

Yeah I mentioned this before. It is caused by the shader being used. Was originally a problem with the Unity TreeCreator shader that this custom one is from. It is not a problem with the current shader so finished or not I will cleanup the update the upload it soon. New shader is double-sided Deferred and actually physically based! Only problem is it requires the custom Deferred shaders and Depthnormal to be set in Graphics. So to use the Deferred shaders it will not be compatible with other things like Alloy or UBER. Should be compatible with the new Lux and AFS soon. Also need to get it fixed for 5.4 since it is currently not working.

 

Here are the two reviews, the first one didn't really play the game properly, but the second one, a Korean, seemed to love it. The graphics look great, and run smoothly even on older computers because I didn't use shadows, instead I used Unity's SSAO, which I've now replaced with Amplify SSAO.

You can download the game here for free, but I made some changes since the reviews and which perhaps weren't the best changes to make.

Because I only using a Unity as a hobby, I really enjoy making the environment but to be honest don't have much patience for the game mechanics lol

 

Cool man! Have been following your site but did not know it was available to play. Looks great! Are the other animals, environments available too?

 

No, only the Vogelkop Bowerbird, available here which used one of your trees, but it hasn't been as popular as the red-footed tortoise. These were more just a case of practicing different ideas, since I'm quite new to Unity. The trouble with the red-footed tortoise game is that I put too much fauna, so many of the animals are hidden. When I get some more time I'll try to create a larger rainforest, one with mountains and less ground cover. Your tropical pack looked amazing though, really impressed with the quality of your work and looking forward to the next update

 

Baldinboy, good to see you were still working on things, I must say that I am in favour of quality, but only if it is highly optimised to be compatible with RTP and ATS, and supports PBR that would be great.

My game is a PC game where the person will be too worried about escaping from dinosaurs rather than flora assemblages...but it still has to look good .

I'd also like to have some edible meshes for Papaya and banana fruits. Plus maybe a mango tree and mango fruit, and possibly a pineapple plant and fruit for the groundcover.

Finally a mangrove tree for the water front would be great. Speedtree have just released a Mangrove tree

Anyway this is just a few ideas to think about which I would dearly love considered

@jonfinlay , fantastic scenery and jungle mate, very dark and captivating. I'm going to download from steam tonigh for a closer look.

 

It will be good performance. The Deferred version as of now is not completely compatible with UBER. Sorry I mentioned RTP. Do not believe RTP requires custom Deferred . Just got RTP and UBER mixed together. Believe it would be partially compatible with UBER if you do not use UBER'S custom Deferred. Would just not be able to use UBER's Deferred translucency.

It should soon be compatible with Lux, ATS, and AFS since they are all getting updated to work with each other. CTI 3, which is the new shader and tree system in the update, has been developed by Lars, which is the awesome dev behind all the extensions listed in this paragraph. Full weather effects on everything from one script! That is what I am hoping for .

 

I was going to get RTP, but after reviewing Lars assets today I've decided to proceed with his assets you mentioned above, so this will work out fine.

 

@Baldinoboy , hey there. I just bought and downloaded the Tropical Forest Pack and I have the weirdest problem. The pack has come with bare tree trunks on the prefabs?

I have checked the demos and they contain the leaves, but outside of that I cannot find any prefabs with leaves. Can you help?

 

hey @TheSeawolf .Thank you for downloading it!

Sorry about that. If it is placing the trees in the scene and they do not have any leaves you need to add a windzone. Does not have to be strong but for some reason that shader does not render the leaves when there is no windzone in the scene. If it is the tree thumbnails that do not have leaves I think it depends on the scene when the previews refresh.

 

I noticed this as well, although even the weak windzones were still a little too strong. Hopefully in the next version you could include windzones for a very light breeze.

 

@Baldinoboy , thank you for that, they are working now Hopefully, I'll have a screenshot for you this weekend.

I have my windzone controlled by Tenkoku, so I have to bump it up higher to get the trees to move

 

Cool! I have not used Tenkoku. I set the trees up to have decent movement with a default windzone. Not sure about Tenkoku but the Unity windzone is easy to weaken and strengthen to best fit the scene.

 

@Baldinoboy

Nice looking asset.

Seems to have gone quiet in here is this still being actively developed?

There was mention of ferns and more lod groups is this still in the pipeline?

 

Hey @AndyNeoman ,

Thank you! Sorry to all but yeah my life has been quite busy with work and other things the last few months. I am actually still working on this. Really wanted to get 1.1 out by the holidays but life has a way of kicking your butt.

Have finally finished the foliage texture which contains over 30 different species of plants! It is a big texture so file size for 1.1 is going to be larger. Good thing though is there are going to be many models from this one texture. Still planning on getting a few more trees out after 1.1 but I am mainly focusing on getting a nice ground cover library for 1.1. The shaders I am using are now using instancing and, already mentioned but, also are now single sided so there is a lot of room to make a nice claustrophobic jungle floor. Right now there is some performance improvement with instancing but hopefully in a future Unity version this will be much more effective. I just started modeling on them but here is a screenshot in blender of a few pieces of the plants:

http://imgur.com/FjweqkM

They are going to be detailed and will of course have LODs.

Other thing being added is props. Props here are fruit, seeds, and ground clutter. So there are separate papaya models. a coconut model, also some sticks and dead leaves that will be from the foliage texture for performance. Collision setup for all.

Sorry if anyone really liked them but I have already removed the banana trees and CoconutPalmTree01. Remaking the palm tree based on a photoscanned trunk and better leaf models. Also re-making banana trees as banana plants which will be more ground cover with some trunks. Much better textures and detailed models.

So it is still being worked on but it is a really big update and I do not have a lot of time to get on it. I will update with any worthwhile news. Basically once a few plants are done I will get a few images out.

Thanks guys!

Edit- Can you guys see the images I am posting here? For me they are just error messages. I have really bad internet though.

 

That's awesome news. I bought it anyway to support a fellow 'blender dev'. Really glad I did now . It looks great btw from the limited time I have spent with it.

Cant wait for your update.

Images look great btw- but it only shows when you reply to post for me.

 

For me the picture above is just an error.

 

Thank you very much for the support. Hope you enjoy it. To everyone. I promise to have 1.1 out soon which will be a very useful update to all. Because of my delay in getting it out I promise not to charge current users for any update to TFP.

Thank you for letting me know @hopeful . I cannot get photos working with the Community right now so just poseted Imgur links to the images that were showing errors for me. Let me know if the links work for you guys. Thanks!

 

The link works.

 

Thanks @hopeful . Will have to use Imgur for now.

 

Hey guys,

Just a couple screenshots to post. Not too many new models in yet but just a while back reworked textures to look much better with the PBR shading. Here is sunlight coming through the forest:


http://imgur.com/zmDPGCh

Looking forward to having plants in here. Performance is not bad. Around 30-40 on my laptop(960m at 1080p res). This is pretty dense though for Unity with shadows. Was kind of a test to see how Unity would do with a more dense jungle. Here is another image using the only ambient technique. This is mainly to @jonfinlay who was asking about this working better. No directional and no shadows with only ambient light and SSAO:


http://imgur.com/XHf2Z4O

Performance is much better with a frame rate of 60-80. New shaders do not act up with low or no lighting. Think it actually looks better for a jungle too. Looking forward to trying this with SEGIs skylight occlusion. Know it would look awesome.

Thanks guys! Will post more later.

 

Hey ... pictures coming through now. Looks beautiful!

 

Thanks! Yeah sent imgur thread links and they work! Not sure if it is Dropbox or the thread image link but got a way around.

 

Wow looks great! Any ideas when it'll be out? Saw this AltTrees system, I'd imagine they´d work well together.

 

Im using Tropical Forest and AltTrees. I think they do go well together. There are several improvements to come from AltTrees that should make a big difference but even in ealy beta it is very promising.

 

Good to know, might snap it up since it's only $10. Cheers

 

Thanks for checking that out @AndyNeoman . Yeah that will help to have a decent sized scene.

Thanks @jonfinlay! Great to hear from you. I am going to submit 1.1 at the end of January even if all that I wanted in it is not ready. The new tree system alone is worth an update. I just mainly want to have enough added to replace what was removed in the update. So mainly plants, including banana.

Not major but was easy to do so I moved it in, I am adding some rocks right now. I photoscanned them a while back and they have just been sitting on my computer. Here are a couple shots of one of them in the jungle. This is just a test scene so it is just a flat terrain with one texture and has 4 flat cubes around the edges to close it in.


http://imgur.com/YkVPrjH


http://imgur.com/ABGdYHV

So since this pack is mainly for foliage I will most likely only have 4 rock formations for some general variation and level design helpers. Will not put much time into these. Just figure I would post those shots because I really liked them. Also once the foliage is getting modeled I will make versions that are one mesh, two materials, that have the plants growing up and over it. Really looking forward to getting that tested out.

Edit- Using New Post-processing Stack (Pre-Release) for image effects in these screenshots. Really happy with it. Lighting is just Sky Cube Ambient, Directional Sun, and a soft blue "Skylight" directional(no shadows). No Enlighten or SEGI in these shots.

 

Great to hear! Really looking forward to the update. I went ahead and bought the AltTrees package, definitely noticed a performance difference though I'll still use it without shadows as I found they really weren't needed.

Also, a little site I found may be of interest to you. I remember you included some rainforest audio tracks in the package, but I've found this site http://www.xeno-canto.org/249587

Basically it has many bird samples, many of which can be shared and distributed and used for commercial purposes, provided it has the following at the bottom of the page, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0

 

That is awesome! Thanks for sharing that. Yeah am going to add a few sounds to give a more dense area less all around noise but a couple animals like a bird and hoping for some deep primate call.

 

Hey guys, just a little update. Know I said a release by the end of the month but just to get a few more things, and clean everything up, I am going to delay that till after this next weekend. So will still submit very soon. So hopefully it will be up by mid February.

Got a few ground cover, plant models up these last couple weekends. Here are a few shots:





So Dwarf Palmettos are not the only ground cover anymore. The new banana plants are still in Blender and should be in soon. A little worried about getting the trunk right because of the trying to keep the model using one texture so they might be more of a ground plant instead of a tall tree-like plant. Will see how I can get it in. If time allows will try getting some palm ground cover in. Will message again by this next weekend.

 

Looks amazing! That really does look like a dense rainforest, really hope I'm able to keep the performance impact down.

 

Thanks! It is getting more dense. It needs more though!

Performance wise it is surprisingly not bad. Granted the test scene I am using is only a 150*150 meter terrain but it is pretty dense. No terrain grass, just LOD prefabs in this scene and there are not many places you can see the ground. Also using 8K Diffuse and normalspec textures for the foliage and rocks. If you do not want the rocks and/or plants super crisp you can lower the texture to 4K or lower if need be. This is closeup of the 8K foliage that not everybody will need but figured you still can try:



At 1080p I am getting 40-50 average FPS with some dips in the 30s. This is with high quality settings with 300m shadows. No V Sync. Without shadows and just a light sun directional and a skylight directional I am getting a smooth 80-100 FPS.
This is on my laptop: i7 5700HQ, GTX 960m 2GB GDDR5 , 16GB DDR3 RAM

The issue with trees in Unity, as many know, is you are quite limited with how much can be on the terrain and as gameobjects the resources are more strained. That is where some like AltTrees are stepping in but still there is no instant working solution. In this scene I am using to test the rocks are placed as gameobjects, the trees as gameobjects, and groundcover as terrain trees and extra added as gameobjects on the rocks. Also some rigidbody papaya and coconuts scattered around. Using Landscaper for this, which is one of my favorite things to have in Unity.

So with a larger terrain I am not sure how dense it can be made before Unity quits. Will do some testing when putting together the new demo scene for 1.1. It will not be a large terrain either but probably 250*250. Will see.

One thing that is helping with performance, which I think I mentioned before, is the update to the shaders that Lars just recently did adds instancing. So now it helps but does not boost a whole lot but Unitys' updates coming 5.6 should improve instancing performance boost. Also according to them Vulcan will be a big boost too.

 

Hey guys,

Very sorry for the silence. I have been dedicating my weekends to finishing this. Have actually got a lot done but everything with this is crazy time consuming. Biggest things that I have finished is:

-the foliage material that includes all the ground cover textures, maps. This was a daunting task because it includes over 50 different images and the many maps needed for each of them.

-the demo scene, which I am very happy with. Made some additional models and simple shaders to give the demo scene a "purpose" I will not spoil too much in the screenshots.

-a bunch of new plant models and a few new trees. So effectively doubling the amount of unique prefabs. No special new tree species yet. Sorry. Can expect a mangrove to take up a few weekends of work so do not want to tackle it yet.

-a few new photoscanned ground materials and photoscanned props.

-improved shading and bending quality. Through a few more additional updates from @larsbertram1 the quality of especially the bending is incredibly better! Also better shading options with the bending using animated normals for the tumbling and turbulence. So more realistic shading of the more realistic bending .

-shrinking the file size by optimizing file types. The latest build of the 1.1 update before the optimizing was over 2 GBs! It is now a lower but still large 1.4 GBs. It is very large because of the newer large texture groups. I can probably get it even lower by sacrificing some quality.

Here are a few shots:









So once again sorry for the wait but know I am working on it as much as I can squeeze in. Looking forward to getting it to you guys!

 

Wow very great work Baldinoboy, my forest is much more beautiful and varied thanks to you!

 

Thank you robymv. Great to hear!

 

@Baldinoboy - You do such a good job with your staging, if you don't do it already, you might supply a few tips about making a great looking scene in your docs.

 

Thanks hopeful! I did a lot in UDK and Cryengine a while back but not much actual decent level design in Unity. Thinking about it this is probably the first actual game like scene I made in Unity. One that you could almost have a level in. Only tips I can give for staging is good level creation. Play around with a scene to make it have a purpose and a bit contrast. Also you have to have fun doing it otherwise you will get bored and quit doing it right halfway through.

Sorry but noticed the screenshots are very dark. Recently imported an update for the image effects and it changed everything with the eye adaptation. Think I fixed it so lighting should be better with the next shots this weekend.

 

Excellent! Can't wait to see this in action. Great work, really looking forward to it. I wouldn't worry too much about the file size, Junnichi's Complete Animal pack is well over 2GB and downloads and imports fine. Perhaps the only thing I could suggest would be to either not include the standard assets or put them in a separate folder so they can easily be unmarked so they don't get imported.