[Released] Vegetation Studio Pro

I wrote a simple integration between Map Magic and Vegetation Studio Pro. It allows you to use VS Pro to add vegetation to Map Magic terrains. It does not add a Map Magic node to generate VS Pro vegetation. If you want that, you'll need to wait for an official integration, but, if you want to use VS Pro's rules to place the vegetation, this script will do the job. Just attach it to the VegetationSystemPro object.

Code (CSharp):

1. using AwesomeTechnologies.VegetationSystem;
2. using UnityEngine;
3.  
4. public class MapMagicVSProIntegration : MonoBehaviour {
5.     private void Awake() {
6. #if MAPMAGIC
7.         MapMagic.MapMagic.OnApplyCompleted += OnApplyCompleted;
8. #endif
9.     }
10.  
11.     private void OnApplyCompleted(Terrain terrain) {
12.         var unityTerrain = terrain.gameObject.GetComponent<UnityTerrain>();
13.         if (!unityTerrain) {
14.             unityTerrain = terrain.gameObject.AddComponent<UnityTerrain>();
15.         }
16.  
17.         unityTerrain.TerrainPosition = terrain.GetPosition();
18.         var vs = GetComponent<VegetationSystemPro>();
19.         vs.AddTerrain(terrain.gameObject);
20.     }
21. }

 

Seems theres a lot of grass not being culled behind the camera. Or is that necessary for when spinning the camera around fast? Was thinking like a buffer but idk lol.

 

I will port the terrain tree importer to VS Pro for the next update. It slipped between the cracks.

Lennart

 

Could you maybe make a video and send me in a PM?

Lennart

 

IL2CPP compiler bug

Hi. The fix for the IL2CPP compiler bug is now available for 2019.1 and 2019.2. Unity said it will be backported to 2018.3 or .4 LTS

It needs at least these package versions
Jobs 0.0.7 preview 9
Mathematics 1.0.0 preview 1
Collections 0.0.9 preview 16

Lennart

 

Hello,

Does Vegetation Studio work in HDRP yet?

Thanks

 

There is only partial support for HD and LW SRP. The spawning system and render loop works in the SRPs and I made some custom nodes for the shader graph to add instanced indirect support for shaders.

https://github.com/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudioPro-ShaderGraphNodes

The billboard system, heatmap preview for splatmap generation and the included grass shader does not work. The SRPs are still in preview and change every release, the only way to get proper lighting added is to use the shader graph to have shader recompile automatically with changes.

What I want to test is to make custom nodes for the billboard system to get all the shadow and vertex functionality in a shader graph node. Problem is that Unity just scrapped the NodeAPI released yet. It looks like it will be added for 2019.1 but not confirmed yet.

Lennart

 

Hi,
I tried to update VS to VS pro, but I got many exceptions and also was not able to load correctly my old vegetation definition file. However, I made a new template and added my grasses again, set the color and lot of another attributes, masks and rules. I fixed the code in some cases, but at the end I got a Unity job error (something like index out of range) and now nothing, no grass on the terrain, even at reloading the project. It was very frustrating to use the pro version after the pretty solid normal version, which also had a more friendly UI.
Every settings I made looks correct, all grasses defined but no grasses are visible in editor or in game. It just swiched of after the job exception...

Unity 2018.3.9f1, VS pro 1.1.0

 

Great. I will try it out.
But what do you mean the "included grass shader does not work"?
Can we use foliage meshes if they already have HDRP shaders?

 

Hi. Could you join the discord server and message me? Easier with a text chat when we look at the error.
Link in my signature.

Lennart

 

Yes. That should work, but there will be no billboards for trees.

Lennart

 

I don't have a discord account, don't even know what that is. Do you have any ideas what it could be? I mean Job and Burst modules are still beta, the last error message looked like Unity internal error. I also see all the jobs in the burst inspector. Do you make any external serialisation that could load a bad state? The error happened when I clicked on the refresh vegetation button. I just need some hints, maybe what debug outputs i should enable.

 

The above link works when there are shader files available but how would you add files to the same folder as the shader when the shader is using the Hidden/Nature/Tree Creator Leaves shaders? I am unable to find that shader in my assets folders. I tried downloading the Unity shaders separately and making the above changes but performance is pretty bad compared to other assets I've done this for.


Separately, with the runtime prefab spawner, which seems extremely useful, is there a way to destroy only the underlying tree painted onto the terrain when the prefab is spawned (and not the prefab as well)?

It seems MaskVegetationItem() hides both the prefab and the underlying tree at once but I would like to move the prefab tree without having the tree painted on the terrain show up to the player.

 

Hi, I've created a indirect render compatible version of the speedtree8 shader and altered it's Speedtree8ShaderController.cs script to allow replacement to work. There seems to be two issues that I've found.

Firstly the code to remove the billboard mesh from the prefab doesn't seem to work for speedtree8 trees and aren't rendered by the indirect render correctly.

Secondly even though the trees render fine in editor, on publish results become very random. Using Indirect rendering results in some trees rendering correctly but many being un-textured and attached to the camera. In Standard and Instanced mode the trees fail to render at all or are off-screen.

I'm sure this is all stuff your working on but love to know if you've got any fixes or workarounds.
cheers

 

Hi! I am trying to set up a Vegetation Mask Line to include certain large objects contained within a Biome. The Vegetation Type dropdown shows Vege Type 1 - 32. How do I correlate the Veg Type with the object I am trying to access? Cheers.

 

Hi. You select any ID on the include rule and then on the Vegetation Item you want to include you enable the VegetationMask rule and select the same ID. Multiple VegetationItems can have the same ID.

Lennart

 

Hi. I will look at this and get back to you.

Lennart

 

Hi.

For the hidden shaders you need to download the shader files from Unity. Separate download.
Then find the shader. Give it a new name (in the shader file) and update it for indirect support.
You can then assign your new shader to the material.

When masking out the tree the run-time spawned prefab will also be removed since it is dependent on the tree.
What you can do is instantiate a new GameObject that is not a child of the run-time spawned prefab and add any script to this. This GameObject will not be removed as the other is destroyed when the tree is masked out.

Lennart

 

Hello,

I follow the guide to start Vegetation Studio Pro but when I use Biome Mask or any mask, I have this error :

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
AwesomeTechnologies.VegetationStudio.VegetationStudioManager.Instance_RemoveBiomeMask (AwesomeTechnologies.VegetationSystem.Biomes.PolygonBiomeMask maskArea

In edit mode, the biome mask works and show its vegetation package.

In play mode, I have the same error several times in the console and the vegetation package of my biome mask disappears..

Do you have any ideas to fix this ?
Thanks

PS : My configuration :
- Unity 2018.3.7f1
- Last version of vegetation pro
- This is a VR project :
- Build Settings : Target platform : Windows x86_64
- Project settings -> Player -> OpenVR

 

Did you have multiple vegetationStudio Manager instances in the scene (or in multiple scenes) at one point? It can't handle that and this kind of error is one of the results (singleton side-effect). You can confirm it (looking at the inspector) if your VegetationStudiomanager has a null entry under its registered systems.

 

Hi @LennartJohansen, fantastic product, I'm analyzing it for production use and so far am very impressed.

I had some questions about best practices:
I'm building a world out of a number of terrains chunks (a combination of Unity terrain and mesh) that are saved as scenes, that are loaded additively to a master scene. A simple form of world streaming. Is it proper to have each of these scenes use its own instance of a Veg.System.Pro script (let's say for a total of 9 or more at once)? And will these load/unload additively and smoothly? Or am I approaching this wrong and should just be adding the terrains to the existing Veg.Studio.Pro via script?

Secondly, am I right in thinking that the only script necessary during runtime is Veg.Sys.Pro? Is it okay (and is there any performance benefit) to disable Veg.Studio.Pro, Terrain.System.Pro, Mesh.Terrain, and so on during runtime?

Finally, is there a way to combine the results of several instances of Veg.System.Pro, say for example I want to create a massive proxy of my combined terrains, and would like to add trees that correlate to what's in the hi-quality results?

Many thanks!

 

You can have a single Vegetation Studio Manager and VegetationSystem component in your main scene.
Define the total area of your terrains/meshes on the terrain tab.

Then load/unload Unity terrains and mesh terrains in this area run-time.

have a look here.

There is no speed benefit of disabling the TerrainSystem component. MeshTerrain components needs to be active on the mesh terrains.

As long as you only have a single VegetationStudioManager component in the scene you can have multiple VegetationSystemPro components each with its own area/terrains

Lennart

 

Sounds like you are missing the VegetationStudioManager in the scene. Did you set up using the menu?

Lennart

 

Hey Hey,

First of all: Thank you Lennart for VSPro. I really appreciate your work.
I have a question and hope, that you (or someone else here with more experience with VS) can give me a hint in the correct direction. I tried to find an answer through the search but couldn't found something that clarify things for me in all detail. So i still have this question unanswered in my head.

Currently i'm working on my different biome packages - filling in prefabs to get things rolling. I'm working with Unity 2018.3.9f1. My development system uses a geforce 1060 gtx as main device. VSPro version i use was the one active in the asset store on 3rd February 2019. I guess it is the latest one available.

At the moment i'm a little bit unsure about the usage of instanced indirect render mode: I choose one of my simple 2D foliage textures and drag it onto the "2D Grass" option in the biome package manager. VS creates the vegetation item for me. After picking the rendermode "instanced" i get the full benefits from instanced rendering. Saved by batching i.e. 30.000. So far - so good.

As soon as i switch to "instanced indirect" the vegetation items are not listed in the batches anymore - hell yeah! This is what i expected! Rendering (visually) works also as expected! But: The performance goes down like hell. With "instanced" the system "saved" around 30k batches and i could travel through my scene at stable 58-62 fps at 1920x1080 with all settings maxed out. Things are more or less GPU bound here (profiler hints me with gfx.waitforpresent).

With the "instanced indirect" render mode setting on the 2D grass vegetation item i barely could reach 1 fps. A short look at the profiler addled me even more cause now i see some massive workload done by the unity "editor loop". Also the cpu ms time goes through the roof (1000ms / frame and more).

I'm really confused now cause i expected "instanced indirect" to be at least as fast as "instanced". I'm pretty sure it is and i'm missing something very rudimental here. Do i need to upgrade some of the VSPro built in shaders with the method mentioned here (https://github.com/AwesomeTechnologies/Vegetation-Studio-Instanced-Indirect) or is the whole "instanced indirect" concept only reasonable for vegetation items like tree's and larger objects?

I guess its some kind of misconfiguration or misunderstanding of the "instanced indirect" concept on my side but I really hope you (or someone else) can give my brain a clue to think in the correct direction.

Thank you very much in advance and Best regards
Tom

 

Hi. Can you tell me a bit more about the scene? Any water system?
Do you use projectors? Forward/Deferred? Multiple real-time lights?

Lennart

 

Problem is FIXED. See next post for solution.


Hey Hey,

Sure, here are some more details. Just let me know if your need to know more.

First of all: We use deferred.

Initially our terrain (2x2k in size with 1k control texture) was stamped with Gaia. We completely dismissed any Gaia references from the scene after the initial stamping was completed. As terrain shader we use the latest version of CTS with the maximum of 16 PBR Texture-Combinations (Advanced Shader with height-blending) right now. Beside AQUAS as main ocean water system there are also some RAM rivers and paths. Enviro takes care of lighting (right now we only use one dynamic directional light) and weather. Weather effects are controlled by Enviro and synced via CTS WeatherManager. The windzones are also controlled by Enviro. On top Easyroads is used to generate some static road meshes. Networking is completely handled by Mirror's Telepathy. The scene runs as server without any terrain, wind or weather network syncs.

AQUAS reflection probe is set to baked - only the Enviro one gets some "realtime" updates from time to time. There we only render the sky and naked terrain geometry. Vegetation, Water, Player-Controlled Gameobjects and so on are ignored there. Beside the main camera we have an additional render camera for a render texture based minimap. There we just render the road meshes (about 10k in tri's) so i guess this shouldn't be a big deal either.

Last but not Least the Post Processing Stack v2 takes care of some color tuning, depth of field, blooming and ambient occlusion.

The current maximum on screen tri-count varies between 4.5 and around 6 million tri's. Depends a lot on the biome (forest, grassland). With normal "instanced" render mode my 1060 GTX reaches a very constant fps between 58-62 in full hd. Reducing to 1600x900 raises the fps to around ~75. So i'm fillrate bound here.
Our office performance monster (i9 with a RTX 2080 Ti just guzzles and gulps this scene at around 220 fps at full hd and benches between 80-85 fps on 4k). To be honest i haven't tried to deploy a build with "instanced indirect" there yet. I will give this a try tomorrow to make sure the 1060's latest NVidia driver isn't messing up something.

All in all the scene is somehow complex and there are a lot of different components, but they really chime together. I already tried to disable component per component but the behaviour didn't change.

Here some further version information:

Burst-Compiler v.1.0.0-preview.6
Collections v.0.0.9-preview.12
Jobs v.0.0.7-preview.6
Mathematics v.1.0.0-preview.1
Memory Profiler v.0.1.0-preview.5

Entities isn't installed right now (as far as i understood this is not required).

Here some snapshots of the current player and render settings:



Just to clarify for others that are interested in VS and might stumble over this posting: Right now we are more than happy with the render performance of the "instanced" version. VS is fast! We received a huge performance increase compared to the classic "unity way" of rendering terrain vegetation.

Perhaps it's just my childish curiosity that wants to understand what's going wrong in our project when choosing "indirect instanced" or the hope to gain even more performance

Best regards
Tom

Edit: TouchReact is used. Already tried to deactivate it but the behaviour persits.

 

Hi. As a first test try following this setup guide for Aquas. https://www.awesometech.no/index.php/configure-aquas-water/

If that does not fix the issue lets try to debug a bit.

Lennart

 

Hey Hey,

Lennart, your question was gold. *Hands-over-a-big-crunchy-chocolate-cookie*

After thinking about the scene setup and especially your question again i just identified the problem.
The culprit was the AQUAS caustics projector being active on the vegetation layer. After excluding the vegetation layers from the caustics projector the scene now runs as expected at smooth 60 fps with "instanced indirect" render mode.

Sometimes you only need somebody to ask the right questions

Thanks a lot for this brain spark and your help.

Best regards
Tom

Edit: Just noticed that the excluding of the vegetation layers is also described in the AQUAS setup guide you just linked. I didn't had that on my radar cause i got AQUAS before VS and didn't think about that correlation after starting to work on the vegetation.

 

What happens is that projectors basically renders the geometry again using the projector override shader. When it tries to do that with instanced indirect rendered meshes it dowes not know how to get the ObjectToWorld and WorldToObject matrixes that indirect sets up in the shader and this messes up rendering.

Lennart

 

Hi @Lennart, I am wondering if you have experienced this problem that I am having now that I am trying to use VS Pro again. I am using Unity 2018.3.10f1 and 2018.3.12f1 and the editor just crashes when I try to select a Biome package in the Biome settings.

Here is a video demonstrating the problem:

Spoiler: Editor crash using VSPro

The crash appears to be in mono-2.0-bdwgc.dll, so I am assuming it is something related to .NET 4.x usage on this machine, but not sure what it could be. Hoping someone here maybe encountered something like this and knows what to do.

Best regards,
Tony

 

Sending you a pm. Let’s debug

Lennart

 

Burst package problem

Hi. There seems to be a problem with the latest burst packages. Try to stay at Burst 1.0.0-preview.6 or earlier until we figure out what it is.

Lennart

 

Hi @LennartJohansen,

I seem to be having trouble with the persistent storage. There seems to be some odd behavior if you have more than one in a scene (regardless of them sharing the same Veg.Sys.Pro or not). What I'm trying to do is bake lesser objects (grass, foliage, etc) to one storage for each streaming world chunk, and then all the worldwide trees to another. This way I can keep the trees visible from long distances on my terrain proxies and only stream in the lesser foliage alongside their terrains chunks.

The problem is that there seems to be some confusion which storage I'm painting into. Sometimes it's fine and paints into the storage I have selected, other times it'll add those objects to an unselected storage. Again, doesn't seem to matter if they are in separate gameobjects with their own Veg.Sys.Pro component.

Finally, is there a way to combine the contents of multiple Persistent Veg. Storages? Thanks.

 

Getting the following error on Unity 2018.3.8f1 with Vegetation Studio Pro. It would appear the Jobs system isn't working because performance is abysmal. Everything is still working though.:

Unexpected exception System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'Smash, Version=0.3.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies.
File name: 'Smash, Version=0.3.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null'
at Burst.Compiler.IL.Jit.JitCompiler.CompileMethod (Mono.Cecil.MethodReference methodReference, Burst.Compiler.IL.Jit.JitOptions jitOptions) [0x000bb] in <598e79fdf78947bf8ead73e90d2d131e>:0
at Burst.Compiler.IL.Jit.JitCompilerService.Compile (Burst.Compiler.IL.Jit.JitCompilerService+CompileJob job) [0x002c6] in <598e79fdf78947bf8ead73e90d2d131e>:0

While compiling job: System.Void Unity.Jobs.JobParallelIndexListExtensions/JobStructProduce`1<AwesomeTechnologies.Utility.Culling.BoundingSphereVisibleJob>::Execute(Unity.Jobs.JobParallelIndexListExtensions/JobStructProduce`1/JobDataWithFiltering<T>&,System.IntPtr,System.IntPtr,Unity.Jobs.LowLevel.Unsafe.JobRanges&,System.Int32)

 

Hi. Try to install an earlier version of the Burst package from the package manager. I know there have been some problems with the last few versions.

Lennart

 

Hi. Do you mind joining the Discord server and message me there? Easier with a text chat to debug and see what is going on. Link in my signature.

Lennart

 

Is the new update going to work with the newer burst packages?

 

The problem is with the burst package not the asset code. It will most likely be fixed in newer packages as Unity updates the compiler. They did some big changes the last few updates allowing for pre SSE4.2 versions of burst in parallell etc. Might be related to that.

Lennart

 

Newer packages of 2018.3 or in 2019.1?

 

Packages are not matched with unity versions. Some work for both and sometimes they will only make new for newer unity versions. We will just have to wait for Unity’s next updates.

 

Hello, I've been having some trouble using Vegetation Studio Pro's shadow culling system due to having multiple light sources in my scene. It automatically grabs a light source, but not the one in question necessary to have the shadows cull properly and I cannot place the light source in Vegetation Studio due to using the two between separate scenes.

I've checked the documentation on the website but haven't seen a way to access the light component of VSPro, since I'd like to be able to set it up via script rather than have it handle this automatically. Is there an easy way to do this?

Thanks for any help!

 

I couldn't figure out how Localized vegetation placement works on the Area mask
For vegetation type it goes from 1 to 32. I have 49 vegetation items.

 

Hi. The VegetationSystsemPro component has a Light exposed as
SunDirectionalLight. You can update this when changing your lights.

Lennart

 

Hi. You select an ID here and on the vegetation item you enable the VegetationMask rule and select the same ID.
Multiple items can have the same ID if you want.

Lennart

 

Vegetation Studio Pro update

Hi. I have submitted a patch update for Vegetation Studio Pro. It has some fixes and API changes needed for a MapMagic integration.

I am in parallell working on some new features but they are not in the main branch. I will tell more when done.

IMPROVEMENTS

• Added function/button on the VegetationPackage to regenerate VegetationItemIDs
• Added helper component for MapMagic infinite terrain

CHANGES

• Terrain is now exposed in the UnityTerrain component

FIXES

• Cell cache and GC cleanup after generation vegetation color masks.
• Fix for terrain texture include rule that could exclude instances in areas where cells overlap multiple terrains.
• Changes to reflection loading of types. It now handles libraries with types that can not be loaded

Lennart

 

Hello. I m beginner user vs pro , also little difficult to learn tuttorials not being a native speaker. So..Question: i imported mountain trees from dynamic nature, dropped to biomie and when creating mask area with that prefabs only trunks of trees are visible near, but having removed the camera up to lod 2 leaves are visible. Uncorrect shaders?

 

Is there no way for grass to use billboards? I notice my grass has billboards but I don't see any options for it on VS pro.
Also did you remove the ability to change the color tint of grass? maybe im blind but I can't find where its at anymore lol.

 

Hi. There should be Vegetation Studio versions of the prefabs in a subfolder of Mountain Terrains.

Lennart

 

Hi. Billboards are for trees only. Grass color tint is a shader feature it should show up if you use the default Vegetation Studio shader by adding 2D grass or making a patch with the Grass Patch Generator.

Lennart

 

Ahh ok man. Would there be no performance increase having billboards for grass?
I know grass doesn't have much geometry. Just curious.