World Building [RELEASED] CScape - advanced building generator

Oh wow, those look great. When are they available?.

I have just begun using Unity Beta versions (latest)

wow, cant wait. Yeah I will be testing speedtrees out soon using Vegetation Studio which removes all of the 12 colliders in a tree and just uses a single collider that loads only within the camera view area. I do still think they will be too expensive for me though as I have a larger terrain - saying that the new Beta Unity version doesnt seem to mind the size. ie I have two 4096x4096 terrains and it makes no difference if I turn one off.

Speedtrees may come in useful for smaller projects/scenes?

 

Oh wow, those look great. When are they available? Cant wait.

 

Thank you thank you! This fixed the same building-green-glow as the other user.

So excited about the release, great work, you should be very proud of yourself

 

I'm in a final phase before submitting this to assetstore. Just one more round of tests.

 

I'm fiddling right now with speed trees, and if set with better LOD distribution, they work better.

 

Thanks for your kind words

 

I changed settings on each LOD. Dirst remove light prove, set LODs to 100-75-35-6 and removed receiving shadows on on all except 1st lod and casting shadows on 1st and 2nd group. They seem to be ok, but I have lots of optimizing to do before I can concidering going much further. Im down to 20-40 FPS which doesnt leave any room to actually create a game beyond the environment itself.

 

Awesome and thanks Olivr, much appreciated.

 

Could there be an integration to use vegetation studio as for foliage ?

 

Hopefully its a yes!!

 

So when compiling the textures in the surface folder, it takes realky long because ita compiling all the textures and just ends up crashes my unity, is there no way to compile just the textures i want on the building at the time?

 

It has to compile all textures at once. You could comment out some texture sets from a script, but a texture sets has to be compiled entirely. And no, it shouldn't last too long. If it does and crashes, be sure that all textures are set to readable-writable and that you have all textures in a folder.

 

New Re_lighting feature is here. It improves Re-lighting feature that shades night scenes without a need for costly realtime lights or baked GI in Unity.

 

What's the price and is there preordering?

 

That looks great Oliver, but I have a query.

I use EasyRoads3D all over my terrain with streetlights that really slow the fps when they turn on at night. Is your version of lighting (sorry for language gap, im not a developer) suitable to add to lights throughout the scene/whole terrain? ie. is there a script to add to existing street lights around the scene?

 

??Okay yeah i must be doing something wrong then....so to complile new textures in the surfaces folder all you have to do is go to the Cs Material Script turn it on and check generate right?

 

Also what does the Substance file u provide for Cdk do exactly? can i use it as a template to make the Cscape textures...If so could u show a quick video demo?

 

I'm not the asset developer, but I would SWEAR the current price $39 and the release price is going to be a decent amount higher. So the 39 is the pre-order price.

I am making a VR game (details here: http://www.blissgig.com/default.aspx?id=48 ) and have been very happy with the result.

 

Well yes.. you have to check that names are written correctly and that there are all textures there (with names from "texturetype_01.png" to "texturetype_10"). Also, be sure that you didn't change a Slices Surface value - it has to stay at default value (10). You can have only 10 textures for one set. Also, check if all source textures have in their settings a Read/write Enabled checkbox turned on (this is essential, otherwise Unity can't read them).

 

This is a good question and I really don't know a correct answer at this moment. A new system gives me a possibility to add general lighting around roads (CScape roads) but it could be also used for adding lighting to buildings around EasyRoads. It can actually make so that easy roads cast light and AO onto buildings and roads. Main problem here is that it requires specific shader for it to work correctly for other objects that aren't using CSCape Materials. I can probably provide a default metallic and standard shader. This new system is nice as as it let's you prebake this lighting information onto a texture, and then it uses this texture data for lighting without impacting render speeds.
But, here I can see one big problem - Unity Terrains.
-They simply aren't good for this task. Their materials can't be easily modified, and this makes almost impossible to make easily any shaders for them.
-Unity Terrain is an outdated system, and Unity is working on a new terrain system that will soon replace existing one. This means that writing a complex shader for replacing unity terrain shader would be too much of a work that will be outdated and non usable pretty soon.
-Even new HD SRP doesn't support Unity terrains - and this says much about a future of unity terrain if even Unity doesn't work on making a shader that works with it's own rendering pipeline.
-This could also probably mean that latest version of Easy Roads could become obsolete when new Unity terrain becomes a standard as it would have to be rewritten to meet new terrain requirements. I hope it's not the case, but I also know, from developers perspective, that when there are lots of changes in internal workings of Unity, it can be really hard to stay on a "road".

 

Yes, and from now on it will continue to grow. A next release will be priced 5$ more. So this is a moment to get your copy before the price goes up next week.

 

I think EasyRoads can be used independently of terrain. Not 100% sure, but I think so.

 

Yes it can, But if you can't conform it to terrain than it looses it's power.

 

I am currently trying to upgrade 2018.1 project to the latest beta version and it is a little troublesome due to the terrains but they may have just been solves with the 0b7 update. Easy roads may have just been solved but veg studio is also causing issues. At present these are minor though speaking as a non developer.

I will wait until I get the 2017.3 official release before taking this further. Thanks Oliver.

 

Introducing my TVAO (Top View Ambient Occlusion) and Re-Lighting for CScape. A solution that is almost completely free in terms of performance. It can run in baked mode, and is replacement for slow lightmap baking, or it can run on runtime (but than it 'costs' a little bit less than a realtime directional light in Unity). It is perfect for simulating open scenes daylight, and can be used also for replacing low performance lights in night scenes.
Both screenshots doesn't use any image effect, and run perfectly on modern mobile device.
Night scene screenshot doesn't use any light, baking or GI other than TVAO Re-lighitng feature, and a daylight scene uses only one Unity directional light with shadows.
If using baked TVAO, it's enough to use one solution for night or daylight scene condition.

 

I haven't used this in awhile but I'm having issues. First it doesnt generate a city at all at first. It states there's an invalid operation exception with deleting a game object inside a prefab.

After hitting refresh the buildings show up but are all green but a few I believe are black

I'm using 2018.3

 

I believe the green buildings need a shader upgrade: The attached file should sort it out.

As for the refresh/generate issue. If you are using a beta version this occurs. I believe its due to the new nested prfabs. If you using 2018.2 or before Im not sure about that. Anyways, the shader should fix the colour problem.

Ah, I see you are using 2018.3. I havent tried in the latest 2018.7.0b7 though. Thats the latest unity version.

ALSO: You may be able to get around the generate city issue by creating the city in an earlier unity version then exporting it to a package then importing that into your new project?

Also if you do do this note that the buildings may not generate when you import them. To get them to show you need to select the first building in the hierarchy, then scroll down the building list using down arrow on keyboard and they will all begin to appear.

You can see in this video how I get buildings to appear.

https://1drv.ms/v/s!AqCnWIL3cdjfgZ4cDdkAHfUkAT67jw

Also note that both Oliver and Unity are aware of this issue.

 

I already own cscape. I was referring to the beta I quoted in my orinigal comment

 

....I already own cscape

 

Yea I already downloaded the patch was avoiding the it since it wasnt for my version but I went ahead and used it and came back to state it did appear to work

 

If you own it then you won't have to pay anything.
As for unity 2018.3 beta.. it is as hawk0077 said..
Unfortunately, 2018.3 is still in beta and is full of bugs that impact prefabs - due to introduction of nested prefabs. Not only, but cscape gets corrupted when imported from assetstore. Only way to correctly install it is to import into a precious version and then copy project folders. This is actually a real hassle for me - i've spent almost two days to try to make a release, but it simply doesn't work.We have to wait a new release and hope that this bugs get sorted in Unity. Rhis affects not only Cscape, but many other assets too.

 

To name a few:

Vegetation Studio - Lennart is on the case though.
Enviro
Easy Roads -Easy roads seems to have been ironed out in the last 3.0b7 version

 

You spoke of awhile back an asset you were making that was separate from cscape. That's what I was asking the price about.

Also within cscape. The city size is doing nothing. Is this because its 2018.3?

 

This is what I was asking about on price. Or will it be part of cscape?

 

Yes city size issue caused by beta version

 

Yes, a Light version will be part of CScape. What is difference between light and standard version? Well, light version supports exporting of faccade textures for CScape, while the full version exports also for standard Unity materials and adds much more prefab templates (like windows doors and so on).

 

Will there be a cossgrade price for Cscape customers ?
Really interested.

 

I woudl like to know a general opinion from current users of CScape:
At this moment for me is really complicated to maintain support for all versions of Unity from 5.6 to 2018.3. There were simply to many changes introduced into Unity, that I think that I should stop supporting Unity 5.6 and concentrate more on upcoming Unity features.

 

I agree. Focus on 2017 up

 

New
Absolutely. Cut work as much as possible I would personally say just 2018.3 but that's because I always upgrade to the latest version of anything anyway (except cars and women)... I would concentrate solely on 2018 and fade out even 2017 as 2019 approaches then keep that cycle going unless its still too much in which case I would cut more of 2017 to accommodate... That also give you time to work on new products instead as well as product improvements where needed/wanted. I would encourage people to upgrade to latest unity at same time. Every thing/version has its lifecycle?

 

As a developer for 20+ years I strongly feel that supporting older tools/os/etc is not worth the value, unless you are a bigger company that can afford to do so... but since you're one person... yea, drop the 5.x support

 

Yeah ditch 5.6 forsure..if that makes it easier on you as the dev I fully support it.... I think 2017.4 and up would be good.

 

This has sense. I have looked into statistics and at this moment almost 50-60% of users work on Unity 2018.2.. only 5-10% on Unity 5.6.
t this moment I would prefer developing only on 2018.2 - 2018.3, because it is really hard to work in 5.6 then have to export always, and re-test on every major version. But anyway, I will probably have to use Unity 2017.2 as latest version and work right on that one.
But this has to be done, as I'm completely stuck into making it work across versions. Lost few days on getting around upgrade bugs from 5.6 Unity to 2018, without any success.

 

I'm using 2018 (thinking to move to HDRP when I end up making shaders and is more stable).
So for my needs yeah, go +2018 (the nested prefabs is something a lot of assets are having trouble with).

 

Nested prefabs itsel'f doesn't give me a headache. I've made some changes to make them work as they have to work. But, what makes problems is asset packages update and probably bugs on Unity side that corrupts imported assets from assetstore or separate package.
I keep loosing prefabs references if I use "unitypakage" files for transfering and exporting plugin from 5.6. For ezample, I loose all references to prefabs that cityscape uses. And, as you probably know, it uses a lot of prefabs. And it's enough to have one prefab that is corrupted, everything "explodes".
But, for example, if I copy-paste folders from previous projects, it works fine. So, this means that there are some bugs in reading package files from older versions.

 

I have made a HD SRP shaders, and they work.. rendering is somewhat better than before. But, I have noticed that HD SRP has some pretty big influence on framerate, even without any objects inside scene. CScape still works well, but this consistent performance loss of SRP adds to overall performance loss. I will have to check how well it scales down (currently mainly working on a laptop with gtx 1070)

 

At this moment I don't know. As I'm currently working on a CScape version of it (the one that is integrated in CScape for free)- it is hard pretty to tell. I think that it all depends on how much work it will require.
Initially, I wanted to sell it as a separate package from CScape, and give heavy discount on it for current CScape users. But, then I've decided to give it for free with CScape.
A non free version of this baking tool won't be priced high.

 

From what I'm looking at, it's kinda similar to surforge with a better workflow for placing prefabs, or I'm out of the ballpark ?

 

I am far from expert but would think that upgrading to the very latest version of Unity would be at the top of any serious game developer/producers list or should be. And I would bet those that are using 2018.2 are only doing so because 2018.3 isn't out yet. So if it was me I would work on the very latest and prioritize that version as you suggested in your response. Due to shelf life's and life cycles of just about anything those using 5.6 should understand and make the upgrades. 2018.3 is such a big upgrade than previously that it has to take priority. Meaning 90% of focus. Good luck whatever you decide Oliver.

 

Well, it's somewhat similar in purpose. But I actually wouldn't compare them too much. And if I have to speak about complexity, Surforge is probably much better. But I think that Surforge is more artists tool (but I never used it - I'm speaking from what I saw on their examples) and more complex to learn and master. From that staindpoint, my tool is really simple as it doesn't require using any new tools and interface if you already know how to work with 2d in unity. Let's say that my tool is straight simple. Instead of modifying meshes as Surforge, it uses depth images as tools that are then layered one over another. It is more targeted towards Arch visualization and fast workflow when you have to deliver various walls and ceilings for architecture presentations or game levels. And also, it is quite good because you can use also depth object libraries that are available from third party developers.