[Released] Vegetation Studio Pro

@LennartJohansen Do you have an ETA on tutorials for making biomes from start to finish?

 

Do you mind messaging me on the Discord server. Easier to explain with a text chat.
Link in my signature.

Lennart

 

Hi. I am now working on updates for both Vegetation Studio and Pro to make a common export format. I also have some Utility components and importers to port to Vegetation Stuido Pro. After those updates I plan to expand the documentatipn with some guides that explan example use of spawning rules and biome mask areas a bit better.

I have no fixed ETA as new smaller issues that should get into the updates are likely to surface.

Lennart

 

Let us know if you have something to test for the export format between standard and pro. We have a project that we are upgrading from standard to pro on shortly and would be happy to give it a shot if you need someone to look at it in beta. If its going to be awhile no big thing we will just go ahead and port everything manually.

Thanks

 

Is there a good way to globally change switch between Instanced and Instanced Indirect? On my computer VS performs better if everything is set to Instanced, but I realize on most modern hardware Instanced Indirect should be faster. So I'd like to be able to add an option in my game settings to switch it on/off.

 

I am having good progress on it. It wil be a separate module included in both Vegetation Studio and Vegetation Studio pro. You create a ExportStorage scriptable object and drag/drop VegetationSystem components to that on the import tab. This will store the common rules of VS and VS Pro and all the instances stored in the persistent storage.

This will then be possible to import in VS Pro.

I will add a per platform setting on this where you can disable indirect and fallback to instanced.

Lennart

 

Development update

Hi. I finished an update on the texture mask system today. There is now a repeat setting in additonal to the worldspace area of each texture. This will allow you to repeat the texture within the area. For custom noise or repeating patterns.

Here you can see a 4x4 repeat on a texture used to include trees on 4 terrains.

Lennart

 

Would this texture repeat feature work with placing biomes on a splatmap generated from worldmachine? so you could assign a biome to a particular colour, not just a single tree.

 

No. But I am looking at that. I did a post earlier on this thread about the format. On my phone, hard to search for the post.

Lennart

 

Any idea what would cause this? I had just changed target to Android.

Assets\AwesomeTechnologies\VegetationStudioPro\Runtime\VegetationSystemPro\Biomes\Masks\PolygonBiomeMask.cs(2,22): error CS0234: The type or namespace name 'Remoting' does not exist in the namespace 'System.Runtime' (are you missing an assembly reference?)

Assets\AwesomeTechnologies\VegetationStudioPro\Runtime\VegetationSystemPro\VegetationStudioCamera.cs(3,22): error CS0234: The type or namespace name 'Remoting' does not exist in the namespace 'System.Runtime' (are you missing an assembly reference?)

 

Any ETA when we will be able to export vegetation packages from VS to VS Pro?

 

It will be in the next update. I almost have it running now. It will not be a complete transfer but most of the rules will transfer. Some things are different in Pro.

Lennart

 

What .Net API version have you set? On the player settings.

Lennart

 

Is there away to have Veg Studio auto place everything using masking and what not and then be able to save that out to persistent storage for tweaking manually. Would be a great feature to get us like 80% and then just tweak.

 

Yes. There is an option on the persistent storage to bake all.

Lennart

 

Is there a way to make vegetation studio auto select the camera with the main camera tag? I use a multi-scene setup where the main camera is in a different scene.

 

I'm using same setup and it auto finds the camera no problem, should be tagged with MainCamera

 

Huh weird, as soon as I hit play it doesn't render to the main camera anymore. I have to drag it to the camera slot.

 

The non pro version is well optimized, what is the real performance improvement, then you have your own culling system behind, especially for a top down game? Net 4.x would break the script inspector asset, is that really necessary? Are there finally any grass shaking animations available?

 

Some more fun with VS Pro & Easy Roads

 

Is it possible to get LOD crossfading on the grass?

Also, I noticed the shrink culling has been commented out in the grass shader. Will it be returning?

 

Yep that was it. I then started running in to other messages which I did not save unfortunately but I vaguely recall something that made em think it was a shader model issue. I have since checked and I did have OpenGl 3 selected and GL3.1 and 3.1+AEP selected. Is that all I needed? I ended up removing Veg Studio Pro and just pulled in the standard Veg Studio which seems to be working without problems for now.

 

hi, i’ve searched on the world wide web, but couldnt find it realy, what is the diffrence between vs and vs pro? is vs sort of light version? or is vs based on the old job system? i’ve got right now the normal vegetaion studio, and can’t decide to upgrade ir stay. might some enlightens me..

 

The first post in this thread is a good place to start: https://forum.unity.com/threads/released-vegetation-studio-pro.538451/

 

yeah, i’ve read that, but it still leaves some kind of lack what exactly the diffrences are, i was looking for something like this:
https://www.ableton.com/en/live/compare-editions/

 

I make this short: If you have Standard and like Standard, you want Pro. Definitely worth it. Get it while it's currently on sale. For me the most impressive main features are:

* Performance: huge vegetation areas thanks to Burst
* Biomes: create masks, duplicate them, drag them around, resize them, drag them over each other and blend them, terrain texturing, etc.

Maybe skip through my vid here how I use it in combination with WC2. Might give you a little help:

Of course there are a lot more features, but for me those 2 are what make me happy and they alone are worth the upgrade

 

Update : Wait a second on this. Looks like one of our LOD objects has an empty Lambert shader on it that appears to be the culprit. Not sure why it would show this as a magic floating portal box but I think if we fix that then this will go away.

Getting a strange artifact showing up. This only happened after we spawned everything. We baked all vegetation items from ruleset. Then modified some things painted etc via persistent storage and now getting this weird artifact. We verified this is somehow from veg studio pro since we can get rid of it by disabling veg system while running. Pausing the game also causes it to go away since veg studio is paused.

It disappears at certain angles so not sure what this is.

 

I thought I'd try something different in the Meadow Environment with Vegetation Studio Pro

 

Seeing two issues with the vegetation studio mask area.

1. The setup is the mask is on a hole game object that I grab from a pool, place into the world and activate. The grass disappears like I would expect. When I fill in the hole I disable the object including the mask script. At this point I get a flicker of all the visible vegetation. It disappears and the reappears.

2. Doing this same action with grass that has been baked to persistent storage does not work at all. The mask is ignored and the grass does not disappear.

Any thoughts on either one? BTW if you need a video I can provide one.

Trying various things right now like just disabling the mask script and that does not work.

Tried the following and the flicker happens at the update point AND again at the setactive(false).

if (_mask != null)
{
_mask.RemoveGrass = false;
_mask.UpdateVegetationMask();
}

yield return new WaitForSeconds(1);

gameObject.SetActive(false);

Interestingly I can place the hole. Pause the game in the editor. Disable the Mask Area script manually, rerun and the grass is now gone and when I deactivate the object the flicker does not happen.

UPDATE: Actually just calling _mask.UpdateVegetationMask(); at any point will cause the flicker.

 

I'm running into a couple of issues due to the fact that I'm doing small, closeup scenes (for interactive installation) rather than a large open-world.

The first is the grass-tufting angle doesn't seem to be adjustable, and when you are close or when the grass is not very dense, it turns side-on to the camera and looks like an X rather than the image facing toward the camera. I tried every rotation option and even tried on completely flat terrain, but had the same issue. It didn't seem to be as much as a problem before I upgraded to Pro, but maybe I'm just imagining that

Secondly, ambient occlusion on post-processing causes the shadows of items behind the grass to show through - see edges of rocks in the image showing through my sea-grass.
I know it might not be worth the effort adding parameters for these issues as very few customers would probably be doing static camera, closeup scenes but thought it worth an ask!

 

Do you mind creating a tutorial from start to finish to recreate these beautiful scenes?

 

I read somewhere some VS features are not available in VS PRO (at least for now): is that true? i may look for that post if you are interested...

 

Tutorial for this as well? Good stuff, congrats!

 

Hi.

1. I will try to recreate the flickering. I think it is related to when the update is done. It should be done early in update. Before the vegetation studio does its culling. Or late in LateUpdate after rendering is done (it will then be affected for the next frame) If done between this it will clear the affected cells before rendering and only respawn the next frame.

If you could join the discord server and message me we could debug together.

2. Baked vegetation are not affected by masks, but I have on my todo list to add an option for this. It could be usefull in some cases.

Lennart

 

There is some things done differently in pro and not all settings and rules works the same way. There is also a few of the utility components and minor features not ported yet. Collider baking for navmesh was one of these, that is finished and will be in the next update. The SceneVegetationBaker and BackgroundMask Creator is also done.

Still on the list is the terrain tree and scene object importer and the microsplat grass mask and tree shadow mask creator.

Lennart

 

Hi. The grass patches are created of multiple grass planes, not billboards that auto orient against the camera.
This is done by design to get grass that does not behave strange in VR

You can make custom patches with the GrassPatchGenerator where you have more control.

The "transparent" AO is an effect of instanced rendering on some AO effects. I think there is a few AO components that work good with this but not all.

Lennart

 

if it follows the camera it is most likely something a vegetation item that is set to indirect with a shader that does not support it. If the box is just there it could be run-time prefab spawner object with a missing prefab?

Lennart

 

Hi. a general crossfade is something I am working on but not happy with the results yet. In the prototype stage.

The shrink culling was earlier implemented in shaders. That was a bit limited since each shader has to support it.
With the jobs/burst and compute shader prepass I can scale objects with no shader support. Idea is to try to move this to the last job/compute shader and support all shaders. Just update the Matrix4x4 as needed. No ETA but on the nice to have feature list.

Lennart

 

The performance increase on Pro is mostly on the CPU side, faster spawning and renderlist creation. Culling is also re-done with a job based culling system.

.Net 4.x is a requirement. This is needed to use jobs/burst with Unity. From 2018.3+ this is also default. Most assets will have to support it fast.

Lennart

 

There is a cameraLoader component you can add to a camera. This will auto add and remove the camera as it is enabled/disabled



Lennart

 

#1. Ok yep that does it. So I was using a coroutine to turn back on the grass and despawn the pooled object containing the mask. This obviously was happening at who knows what point in the update cycle but not early or late for sure.

#2. Is there some other way to clear out baked veg? If not until you get to your todo its not a big deal since we really did not want to bake the grass anyway, just kind of got pulled along for the ride with trees etc. However would be nice to have the option. Does baking also effect the ability to remove things like trees (ie think cutting them down) without some mask option. I thought that was done differently but need to go back and re-read the docs on that.

Back to #1. More details.
So I changed that code to set a bool value that I would then check for in the update which in turn would turn back on the grass and despawn the object. This worked. Here is my hack. My guess is that you can repro this fairly easily by triggering the update to the mask via a coroutine as I did. If not I will jump on discord with you as suggested if your looking for a "better" fix. This change does appear to work for us (unless its a timing issue and could come back to bite us at random times so please let us know, obviously want a fix that always works). Thanks.

IEnumerator FillHole(Character character)
{
character.TriggerAnimation("Dig_FillHole");

yield return new WaitForSeconds(1.2f);

_killGrass = true;

yield return true;
}

private void Update()
{
if (_killGrass)
{
if (_mask != null)
{
_mask.RemoveGrass = false;
_mask.UpdateVegetationMask();

_killGrass = false;

OnFinish();
}
}

}

 

So you mean that i should actually buy VS PRO and all the features will be on par eventually? What if i'd like to use it on older Unity versions? Maybe the older version could be included in the new one for a small price? Just asking...

 

Thank you. I might in the future. I'm still exploring assets and which way to go.

 

Does Vegetation Studio Pro work on 2018.3? I get a lot of errors, eg. NativeList<> could not be found? 2018.3 is an awesome update, everybody should move as fast as possible to that version, because of the nested Prefab feature and because of the terrain changes.

 

Hi. It should work good, but you do need to make sure you have the packages installed as in the setup guide. NativeList is in the collections package.

Lennart

 

Hi. All features not replaced by a different workflow will show up in Vegetation Studio Pro. There is an upgrade path from Vegetation Studio to Vegetation Studio Pro if you want access to Vegetation Studio and then upgrade.

Lennart

 

Not on my dev computer today but I will look at your code and questions as soon as I have time.

Lennart

 

Animated looks better

 

Something must be wrong with the Asset store.
Says Vegetation studio pro was updated on December 17 to version 1.01
The asset store shows i already have this version.

pretty sure i never downloaded the update and imported it.
is there a file in the Awesome Technoogies folder that shows my current version?

 

Probably only some meta information got updated. I noticed that with other assets as well. Really confusing.