[Released] Vegetation Studio Pro

Looks like the scene is not properly dirtied when the 'Add Vegetation Studio Pro to scene' menu option is used. Without altering anything on the created systems they're gone after a restart. Just wanted to note that.

 

Hi!Im using VG Pro with MapMagic....I have everything on run time problem is my terrain is 10x10 and run time generates only on terrains that is pined so they are in scene others that generates later dont have anyvegetation on them...is there fix?or how to go around it so i dont need pin x100 terrains?

And its also not let me exclude grass being spawned on sand ... I want use MapMagic and CTS and then put all vegetation using run time in vegetation studio pro...but i cant figure it out if its even posible to controll something like that

 

Thanks. I will add it to my list

Lennart

 

Hi. I do not really know MapMagic well, but when a new terrain is created it needs to have the UnityTerrain component added. This component can register itself to the VegetationSystemPro component and be included as a terrain.

Contact me on the discord server to look more at this.

Lennart

 

Deleting everything in my App Data Unity folders did the trick. Thanks!

 

Is there any documentation or any hint on Quality Manager component and Predictive cell loader system usage?

Best regards!

 

Hi! I have a little problem.
My prefab consists of two objects, but when I add it to VSP, the second object is ignored and only the first is used to create the vegetation item. How can I keep both objects? If I can't keep them, can I somehow add the second object to the first one during the runtime?

 

Hi. The vegetation has to be a single mesh. Multiple submeshes and materials is possible.
You will have to merge the 2 meshes to a single mesh and then add that object to Vegetation Studio.

Lennart

 

Hi. I should add a page describing that. I will post a small guide for you here and then update the webpages.
At home now but I will do this after the weekend.

Lennart

 

Hi,
If I'll sync VS Pro with Enviro, which controls the change of seasons / snow.

If I have a Forest biome and WinterForest biome, is there any way to switch all plants and textures from Forest to WinterForest when winter comes? switch on for the winter and back, on the territory of one biome I mean.

 

Does Vegetation Studio Pro support the HDRP ? Cheers!

 

Hi, Lennart.

I tried new version of VS Pro on iPhone8.
The billboard trees trouble is fixed with Unity2019.2.1f1.

It's REALLY AWESOME!

 

Hi! I have another question regarding prefabs..
If I add a script to a prefab, will VSP keep it when it makes an instance?

 

Using Veg Studio Pro and am getting an issue when I hit play in the editor the object, such as a tree, will spawn a single entity on the camera. Can't figure out why.... Unity 2019.2

 

Hi. You probably have an VegetationItem set to instanced indirect rendering with a shader that does not support it. Change it to instanced or modify the shader.

Lennart

 

Hi. When rendered the instances are not GameObjects and can not have any scripts. There is however a couple of workarounds. The collider system will create colliders from a pool when close to the camera. The collider system has an OnCreateCollider event where you can add scripts.

You can also look at the runtime prefab spawner component. That can be used for spawning effects like falling leaves etc.

 

One option could be to make a summer and a winter biome and change this when your season change.
There is also some assets that support dynamic snow. NatureManufacture has some. With these you can adjust the snow level of the Environment Setting in Vegetation Studio Pro and this is passed to the shader.

 

Hi. Have a look at this post.

Lennart

 

You'll be glad to hear Unity plans to ditch the standard render pipeline and replace it with Universal Render Pipeline (former LWRP). So you won't have to maintain 3 separate pipelines.

 

Hi Lennart,
thank you for your swift reply.
I am not sure what exactly you are telling us with this post ;-) , but it is good to know, that you will support Veg. Pro 2019 for a long time.
I had a look at your discord channel and it seems some people are working with HDRP and Vegetation Studio Pro 2019 and it works more or less, (despite the billboard problem -it seems that by using amplify impostors it works)......if this is true, I will try to upgrade my project to HDRP.
Do you think this is worth a try? (I use Veg Pro 2019)
Cheers!

 

Great tip, this fixed my problem with this:



Thank you.

 

That's a hilarious screenshot

 

Jep, after walking on the terrain with my player character i suddenly saw a crazy shadow on the terrain. After looking in the scene view in playmode i got this picture

 

I'm using the standard Vegetation Studio in my game, I have a pretty dense forest using Nature Manufacture assets. I am getting average 45-50 FPS when using Vegetation Studio. It would be impossible to run my scene without it! I was wondering if upgrading to Pro would increase my FPS dramatically or not.

 

Hi. It depends a bit on what is limiting your FPS now. If you are CPU bound the Job system and burst compiler used in Vegetation Studio Pro should give you a lower CPU use and increase your FPS.

If you are GPU bound the increase is smaller. The render loop is quite similar but with the increased spawning speed of the Job system larger internal cells are used and these will merge a bit faster since there are less of them giving you a small increase.

There is also a few new rules like distance falloff for grass. This allows you to lower the density in the distance based on camera view and will result with less meshes rendered. The effect of this is best in a 1st/3rd person view but less when viewed top down.

Lennart

 

Thanks for the quick reply! I'm definitely CPU bound. I'll be checking this out then.

 

Hello, I've been using Vegetation Studio Pro to generate a large field of grass and it worked great!

The issue I ran into was that I'm using a projector and while it projects on top of the terrain fine... it doesn't project on top of the grass. The grass is of a custom shader but I tested putting the grass as a GameObject and the projector does detect it (although a bit weird)... but when instanced using vegetation studio pro... it doesn't... can you help me with this?

The projector is made from the Unity Component alongside the Amplify sample for a light projector.

This is a picture of the projection of top of the grass spawned as a GameObject


And this is a picture of the projector on the grass generated by Vegetation Studio Pro

 

Hey,

i use tree creator trees and have huge differences between mesh trees and billboards. Billboards are much darker.



Do you have an idea what could be the Problem?

Thankks,
Andre

Edit:
Used new tree pack from asset store compatible with vs fixed the issue.

 

Hi, do I really need to install Unity Post Processing?
I use custom post-processing stack for now.
For what Unity Post Processing is needed?

 

That is optional from 2019.1. You can remove it for earlier Unity versions also but then you need to remove the assembly definition files.

There is integration with Biomes creating PostProcessing areas based on the BiomeMaskAreas.
This can allow you to have different post processing profiles for different biomes.

Lennart

 

By default projectors does not work with instanced indirect rendered meshes. The reason for this is that the projector renders the meshes again with an override shader and that shader has no knowledge of the instanced indirect rendering and the buffers on the GPU.

I never tried it, but if you modify the projector itself with the same instanced indirect support it could work.
Message me on the discord server and we can look at it.

Lennart

 

Hi Lennart,
Thanks for the last response
A query with the terrain list in Veg Studio Pro. My previous terrain tile setup was deleted and replaced, yet the terrain list still shows them, although now they are detailed as "unknown' with a 'none' game object. It doesn't adversley affect it as far as I know, but it does make for a long list to navigate through. Can the superceded terrain items be deleted at all so they don't appear in the Terrain tab?

 

Hey,

any news for supporting instanced rendering with light probes? One could basically just use terrains lightmap and shadowmask as shader input instead, as lighting information for vegetation is only needed near the ground.

Best,
Andre

Edit:


I was able to modfy the grass patch shader/material with a lightmap/shadowmap texture sampler generated by mixing the terrains lightmap and shadowmask.

Added this in a_grass.cginc:

float _lightShadow = tex2Dlod(_LightShadowMap, float4((transformPosition.x + 1000.0f) / 2000.0f, (transformPosition.z + 1000.0f) / 2000.0f, 0, 0)).r;
o.modifiedColor.rgb *= _lightShadow;​

 

We had to use something like this, when we added chopping for our trees, since its more than a simple tree falling down, we actually modified the trees .. it works fairly well.

 

Hello. I have one problem.
I have a Unity terrain with VS Pro, generated splatmaps and customized grass. All works fine.

When I create a second Unity Terrain (with a different ID) in a separate prefab, add it terrain to VS Pro, then all my grass on the first terrain disappears. What am I doing wrong?

Edit: I try it today and it worked great, the grass did not disappear. It’s strange

 

Hello,

VS is giving me some really ugly billboards.

I am using speedtree 8 models that already had billboards. Anyway to override VS wanting to make it's own? And if not, any way to make them not look like cardboard boxes?

I did swap materials on the billboards, maybe that broke something? However the billboard fade was working correctly before VS implementation.



edit : now that I think about it, I thikn its funky billboards cause its taking the pics from an unlit shader. Maybe its not set up for that? In any case, simply overriding so that we only use the speedtree one should solve problem, i think

 

Billboards are coming out black on mobile, is this a known issue

samsung galaxy 10+

 

Not that I know of. Could you message me on the discord server. Lets debug.

Lennart

 

Hi. Could you message me on the discord server. Lets look at that. Billboards should not look like that.
Vegetation Studio can not use the original speedtree billboards, they do not batch together as needed.

Lennart

 

Thanks. I will have a look at this. Good idea.

Lennart

 

Unite Copenhagen.

Hi. I will be at Unite in Copenhagen next week. Sent me a message if you are there and want to meet and have a chat.

Lennart

 

Hi,
Using Unity 2018.3 I got the following errors/issue, and cant figure out the cause as everything was working fine a couple of days ago.

The first 2 errors occur on loading project. The third error occurs when I try to build the splatmaps for the default biome.

I dont recall doing anything drastic enough to cause the issue.

I upgraded the project to 2019.2.6 and still get the same error.

Any ideas

Unity 2019.2.6
VSPro
All packages up to date

Thanks

Error 1 on Loading Project

InvalidOperationException: The previously scheduled job AddInstancesJob writes to the NativeArray AddInstancesJob.MatrixInstanceList. You are trying to schedule a new job AddInstancesJob, which writes to the same NativeArray (via AddInstancesJob.MatrixInstanceList). To guarantee safety, you must include AddInstancesJob as a dependency of the newly scheduled job.
Unity.Jobs.LowLevel.Unsafe.JobsUtility.Schedule (Unity.Jobs.LowLevel.Unsafe.JobsUtility+JobScheduleParameters& parameters) <0x2467eaac940 + 0x0006a> in <e3232360d51c46c786dd547e2f0b3f8b>:0
Unity.Jobs.IJobExtensions.Schedule[T] (T jobData, Unity.Jobs.JobHandle dependsOn) (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Runtime/Jobs/Managed/IJob.cs:37)
AwesomeTechnologies.Utility.VegetationItemSelector.LoadVisibleCells (Unity.Jobs.JobHandle processCullingHandle) (at Assets/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudioPro/Runtime/Common/RunTimeLoader/VegetationItemSelector.cs:254)
AwesomeTechnologies.Utility.VegetationItemSelector.ProcessVisibleCells (Unity.Jobs.JobHandle processCullingHandle) (at Assets/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudioPro/Runtime/Common/RunTimeLoader/VegetationItemSelector.cs:149)
AwesomeTechnologies.ColliderSystem.ColliderSystemPrnRenderComplete (AwesomeTechnologies.VegetationSystem.VegetationSystemPro vegetationSystemPro) (at Assets/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudioPro/Runtime/ColliderSystemPro/ColliderSystemPro.cs:309)
AwesomeTechnologies.VegetationSystem.VegetationSystemPro.LateUpdate () (at Assets/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudioPro/Runtime/VegetationSystemPro/VegetationSystemPro.cs:847)

Error 2 on Loading Project

InvalidOperationException: The previously scheduled job MergeCellInstancesJob writes to the NativeArray MergeCellInstancesJob.OutputNativeList. You must call JobHandle.Complete() on the job MergeCellInstancesJob, before you can write to the NativeArray safely.
Unity.Collections.LowLevel.Unsafe.AtomicSafetyHandle.CheckWriteAndBumpSecondaryVersion (Unity.Collections.LowLevel.Unsafe.AtomicSafetyHandle handle) <0x245cc363020 + 0x00052> in <e3232360d51c46c786dd547e2f0b3f8b>:0
Unity.Collections.NativeList`1[T].Clear () (at Library/PackageCache/com.unity.collections@0.1.1-preview/Unity.Collections/NativeList.cs:289)
AwesomeTechnologies.VegetationSystem.VegetationSystemPro.Update () (at Assets/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudioPro/Runtime/VegetationSystemPro/VegetationSystemPro.cs:623)

Error 3 on Generating Splatmap for default biome. The process gets stuck at the fourth terrain tile. Other biomes stall at various other tiles.

InvalidOperationException: The previously scheduled job AddInstancesJob writes to the NativeArray AddInstancesJob.MatrixInstanceList. You must call JobHandle.Complete() on the job AddInstancesJob, before you can write to the NativeArray safely.
Unity.Collections.LowLevel.Unsafe.AtomicSafetyHandle.CheckWriteAndBumpSecondaryVersion (Unity.Collections.LowLevel.Unsafe.AtomicSafetyHandle handle) <0x245cc363020 + 0x00052> in <e3232360d51c46c786dd547e2f0b3f8b>:0
Unity.Collections.NativeList`1[T].Clear () (at Library/PackageCache/com.unity.collections@0.1.1-preview/Unity.Collections/NativeList.cs:289)
AwesomeTechnologies.VegetationSystem.VegetationPackageInstances.ClearInstanceMemory () (at Assets/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudioPro/Runtime/VegetationSystemPro/VegetationPackageInstances.cs:84)
AwesomeTechnologies.VegetationSystem.VegetationCell.ClearInstanceMemory () (at Assets/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudioPro/Runtime/VegetationSystemPro/VegetationCell.cs:78)
AwesomeTechnologies.VegetationSystem.VegetationCell.ClearCache () (at Assets/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudioPro/Runtime/VegetationSystemPro/VegetationCell.cs:119)
AwesomeTechnologies.VegetationSystem.VegetationSystemPro.ClearCache (UnityEngine.Bounds bounds) (at Assets/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudioPro/Runtime/VegetationSystemPro/VegetationSystemPro_VegetationCells.cs:300)
AwesomeTechnologies.TerrainSystem.TerrainSystemPro.GenerateSplatMap (System.Boolean clearLockedTextures, AwesomeTechnologies.VegetationSystem.IVegetationStudioTerrain iVegetationStudioTerrain) (at Assets/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudioPro/Runtime/TerrainSystemPro/TerrainSystemPro.cs:227)
AwesomeTechnologies.TerrainSystem.TerrainSystemPro.GenerateSplatMap (System.Boolean clearLockedTextures) (at Assets/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudioPro/Runtime/TerrainSystemPro/TerrainSystemPro.cs:289)
AwesomeTechnologies.TerrainSystem.TerrainSystemProEditor.DrawEditBiomeSplatmapsInspector () (at Assets/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudioPro/Editor/TerrainSystemPro/Editor/TerrainSystemProEditor.cs:257)
AwesomeTechnologies.TerrainSystem.TerrainSystemProEditor.OnInspectorGUI () (at Assets/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudioPro/Editor/TerrainSystemPro/Editor/TerrainSystemProEditor.cs:66)
UnityEditor.UIElements.InspectorElement+<CreateIMGUIInspectorFromEditor>c__AnonStorey1.<>m__0 () (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/Inspector/InspectorElement.cs:501)
UnityEngine.GUIUtilityrocessEvent(Int32, IntPtr)

Thanks. Much appreciated.

 

This just solved itself. No idea of the cause but it seems to be working fine again now.

 

Hi Lennart,
I know you are in Copenhagen this week so my post has probably a wrong timing but I ask anyway.
At using VS PRO to generate grass+rocks+trees on my terrain, I experience the intersection-problem that some of the users have reported earlier. The problem is that objects (rocks) are intersecting with grass and trees with objects, because it seems that they don't know of each other. This produces bad looking results at random places on the terrain:


I think VS PRO is a great tool with a lot of cool features, but such collisions/intersections are very disappointing. Is there maybe a possibility to avoid them? Maybe with layers, or with the "obstacle mask creator" feature (in VS non-PRO) you mentioned earlier? As I am a very bad designer, VS PRO would help me a lot to procedurally generate my terrain objects, it would be great if no manual placement would be needed.

Thank you for any help,
best regards,
Peter

 

Im no developer but I did hear Lennar mention this in one of the video tutorials from the asset store. I need to look at this also but mine are much less severe as far as I have seen.

I believe it was collider related. I think also that having different seeds helps a little. Not sure though.

 

@LennartJohansen Hey i was wondering is it possible to use Vegetation studio where tree prefabs show up in the Hierarchy?

I'm using a RTS frame work right now and those are the requirements atm. sucks I may not be able to use Vegetation studio with it.

 

Hi, thanks for the reply. Yes, in the tutorial for VS (non-PRO) it is mentioned that the checkbox "Collision detection" should be activated for trees (instead of using Perlin Noise), in order to avoid collision/intersection between them.
My problem is that in VS PRO there is no such checkbox. There is a "Colliders" area for the biome items. I actually turned on the colliders for my trees and objects (using the "from prefab" variant), but I think this is only for collision detection against the camera. Anyway, it did not helped for solving the intersection-problem. Turning on or off perlin noise (for distribution) had no effect for the issue as well.
So the question is, what is the role of the Seed value, the activated colliders and activated (or deactivated) noise in checking for intersection between objects/trees/grass at spawning them?
I mean, it would be very important to check for intersection between items from different sub-groups (i.e. intersection test between a rock (object) and a tree), not only between all trees.
Or is such a collision test only available in VS non-PRO?
How the different demos (ex. from NatureManufacture assets) solve this intersection problem?

 

I haven't looked into this since seeing the tutorial that mentioned it. My terrain is massive so its impossible to check everything physically, I was going to return to the tutorials when I was done to check what it said about the colliders. but if you say it was just VS and not Pro then I would most probable have to ask Lennart, the developer.

Different seeds will indeed move some objects but as mentioned without actually checking everything physically in the environment its pretty much impossible depending on your terrain size.

A different seed would most likely remove some issues but could also create others. You could try changing a seed of say 34 to 35 as I believe that would move the trees slightly away from the rocks, but this might move other trees into other nearby rocks.

My terrain is 8192x8192 so that option is impossible for me to check. I have noticed a few things whilst walking around the terrain checking things so will have to ask Lennart, He is away at present I believe so not available. He does usually respond very quickly though.

 

I wouldn't use anything larger than a 4k terrain. If you need anything larger use multi terrain tiles. Reason is cause Unity higher resolution on the terrain is 2k. So as you are smoothing out the terrain you are going to see triangles in the terrain.

 

Thanks, Its 16 tiles. 4x4. But thanks.

Also, are you referring to the tile (2k) or texture resolution?
At present each tile size is: