[Released] Vegetation Studio Pro

Hi, I am not sure where along the workflow this issue is occurring so thought I would begin by asking in this forum.

The terrain tile textures are not aligning after generating splat maps.
I am using CTS and VSPro and so changes in VSPro should be reflected in the CTS textures but I am getting the issue as below image clearly shows.

Any ideas how to fix this? Thanks.

 

Is there a way to import existing trees and grass from a terrain, into VSP?

 

Im no expert but have been working with VSPro for a while and have never seen anything that implies that this can be done, I believe you can import textures from terrain but havent seen the same function for trees, objects, plants or grass.

 

Hi, not sure if you got this sorted but I believe its the touch react system that you need to add to objects. I cant get it to work myself but on the page below you can see that grass goes through a rock then with touch react the grass misses the rock and is then placed around the rock.

https://www.awesometech.no/index.ph.../touch-bend-system/#Touch-Bend-Mesh-Component

Hope that helps, if you get it working let me know as I cant figure it out. What needs a mesh, what needs a collider etc. Cheers

 

Hi, thank you for the hint, I will try it out. I still didn't received any answer from the developer, but it seems that this is the only possibility in VS PRO, I hope it will work.

BTW, it is very disappointing that VS (you pay 75$ for it) has a lot of great features that are not present in VS PRO (that costs 129$).
For example, I have tried the "obstacle mask generator" feature in VS PRO (since I don't own VS), but no success, it generated me a completely empty mask image. This feature is described only in VS non-PRO.

But if you think about it, why one should manually setup and configure such masks/exclusion-rules/touch-react-systems in order to avoid intersections between spawned items? This should be a trivial feature that should automatically work in the background. Nobody wants grass that intersects with rocks. Nobody wants rocks that intersect with trees.

My setup has nothing special, I have a simple Unity terrain with a default biome where I configured some grass and rock prefabs from NatureManufacture. If I start the game with the standard FPS camera, the collisions between grass and rock are visible after ca. 1-2 seconds running around, making the whole scene very unrealistic.
Then I created a forest biome with bigger rocks and some trees. Again, immediately after start, you can see trivial collision issues between rock and trees. Why should I use costly, mega realistic assets with a costly vegetation generator system, if the end-result is so unrealistic?

 

Lennart, the developer is away at present otherwise he usually responds to emails within a 30 minutes.

I get what you mean about some of the basic functionality, but what you say is really only apt for your instance.

From my perspective having to add the parts is a good thing in regards to performance. Actually I am struggling to get my project to run at 60fps and above so I can actually turn the environment into a game. I have land, veg, rivers and sea and I'm struggling at 35-45fps with dips to 15 and 20 fps and below which is really no good at all.

Saying that VSPro runs a lot of veg in my project and runs it pretty well considering, so the price tag as been worth it.
I actually use trees from Nature Manufacturer Meadow environment because my expensive Speed Trees (£130) are pretty much useless on a game/environment such as mine.

As you can see I have a 8k x 8k environment:



That has quite a few large forests: (brown areas).



And is quite dense on the ground:



So getting it running is my real concern at present, and having the ability to leave functions off such as touch react is quite good for me although I am not making the best of it due to my lack of programming and general game coding knowledge. In my efforts to get it running smooth. So I can then add GUI and game levels/path etc.

My big issue is really the language barriers I have encountered in gaming in general. It seems the developers are super smart in the gaming development area and so they write as if I already know... which of course I don't. So its difficult to get a fully integrated picture of how things actually work. Touch React for instance.

From what I have read, you put a Touch React Collider on your character, and Mesh or Collider on object and it should work, but there's a step that makes no sense. ie: Activate Touch React on the object? Where? to that end it doesnt work at all as yet.

Apart from my lack of knowledge and ability I believe VSPro is pretty great and to be honest I just upgraded to Pro to get the biomes ability so I could add dense forests etc...

One thing that comes to mind as I write this is that my basic terrain is quite sparse of trees apart from the grass and rocks. So you don't immediately get thrown in front of small but bad issues such as trees coming through rocks. I have seen none.

Then on the other side of the scale my forests areas are quite dense which also makes seeing trees coming through rocks quite difficult and so not that much of an issue as yours seems to be.

Lastly I believe (it seems this way) that if you have a tree object set at SEED 34 and then add a rock object set at SEED 34 it generally places them very close together. Or indeed on top of each other.

I will test this theory out if I find a tree growing through a rock, I have seen one but Il check the seeds to see if it does make a difference.

 

Yep - I beleive 2 objects spawning with same seed and same perlin size will appear on the same spots. You can use this to invert the second object, so one is on the positive space with the perlin and one is in the negative spaces in the same perlin noise.

 

Hi. I have been out traveling but back in the office tomorrow. Will respond to messages then.

lennart

 

I did try this last night and changed seeds from 76 to 77, 78 and 79. The effect was actually worse as the rock moved and instead was placed within another tree, but worse. But then I didnt use the invert perlin noise feature which would seem to place trees and rocks in the opposing spaces as you suggest.

 

Hi, I have checked the "Touch React System PRO" features in VS PRO, but enabling it for Vegetation-Studio-rendered items is again a feature that is only present in VS. So I have again no luck.
If you check the documentation of "Touch-React-System" for both VS and VS PRO at awesometech.no, you can see that this is the only difference between them: in "Touch-React-System non-PRO", the touch-react-feature can be enabled also for items rendered by VS itself.
In "The Touch React System PRO", only normal game-objects can be used for grass-bending.
And if I understand it right, using "Invert Perlin noise" works only if you have two vegetation items. In my setting, I have a coule of grass/rock/plant items.
So I have still no real solution for the intersection problem, I hope that Lennart will answer my posts.
Cheers.

 

He'l be on it I would think when he has caught up with requests etc. since returning to work.

 

Hi. Do you mind joining the discord server and message me there? Much easier to look at your issues with a text chat?

Lennart

 

Hi. This is not possible. The trees are not GameObjects only instances in memory rendered with the graphics API

 

Hi Lennart,

I will try to be online tomorrow, but mostly it is difficult for me to remain online for a longer time during the day (I have 3 children and a wife...).
But if you can, please check by previous posts here in the forum, where I descibed my issue already, incl. screenshots. The first post: Sep.23 at 7:48PM, the second: Sep.27 at 12:57PM, the third: Oct.2 at 11:15PM, they are conversations with Hawk0077.

In short: I am searching for a good and effective solution against the intersection/collision problem in VS PRO (ex. grass is growing through rocks, rocks and other object collide with trees).
In my default biome I have 6 different grass prefabs, 2 plant prefabs, 5 rock prefabs (small objects).
In my "forest" biome I have 1 rock prefabs, 4-5 different trees, 1 mushroom prefab (as plant) and 2 tree trunks (as small objects).
All from NatureManufacture.

I have tried:
- playing with density and sample-distance values
- playing with the seed value (of course I have set different seeds for each object)
- playing with perlin noise settings (enabling, disabling, setting "inverse")
- turning on colliders for objects
- generating obstacle map (resulted in an empty image) => VS non-pro feature?
- wanted to set my rocks as "touch-react" items => VS non-pro feature?

Nothing of them helped.
I wanted to know if other VS PRO users experience the same issue and how they solved it. Maybe I am missing something in my setup.

Thanks for helping,
best regards,
Peter

 

Hi,

I'm just trying to find the best shader for my trees using VSPro. The bark seems to be fairly easy, but using the standard shader on the leaves gives a very different colouration. I have a prefab tree that I have manually placed in the scene and then using this to fine tune the VSPro trees. The VSPro tree leaves colouration is very subdued compared to the adjacent standalone prefab I'm working on. (Update Prefab button has been used after each shader tweak).
Anyone have any tips on leaf shaders?
Trees are custom built in PlantFactory.
Also, any tips on getting wind deformation from PlantFactory through to Unity? PlantFactory can add the cyclic animation through either bones or points.

UPDATE: Okay - so I changed the leaf texture colour in Photoshop and this change was reflected in the VSPro tree mesh (using Standard shader). Seems like the shader colouration (diffuse) added to the texture isn't added to the VSPro tree meshes. This I can deal with as I can tweak in Photoshop. The main challenge is getting the billboards to look at least similar in colour to the meshes. The trees are just lacking in colour depth and density.

 

Hi, I think you might have unrealistic expectations here. Even the best AAA titles have these issues, particularly if you are procedurally placing objects. It's generally an accepted visual anomaly for smaller vegetation. For larger objects like trees/rocks, you can play with the seed to ensure objects aren't near eachother, but again, intersections aren't completely avoidable. Your best bet would be to manually place larger objects, with an eye for where the procedural foliage might be intersecting with it.

 

Agreed, Far Cry 5 is (if you want perfection) terrible, theres grass floating in the air all over the place not conforming to the terrain at the top of cliffs and so on. But its still a great game.

Me and a friend spent hours watching me swim on land. Freekin awesome. Hahaha

 

Hi, thank you for your answer. I have hoped that there is a better solution (since VS non-pro can definitely avoid intersections, there are several ways to solve this issue. Ok, I know, VS does not use burst / instanced-indirect-batches).
For small foliage, I can accept it. For the bigger objects: I know this is a stupid question, but how can I fix individual intersections if I find one? The vegetation items are not present in the scene so I can not move them away. Should I play with the seed and hope that the new seed value does not create intersections at other places?

 

You might look into Lennart's Persistent Storage option. There are limitations and I'm personally trying to come up with a better way of placing objects, but the system works and ideal for manual placement. For example, in my project I'm hand placing every tree, and falling back on procedural placement for grass and flowers.

 

Hi @LennartJohansen, is it true that intersections aren't completely avoidable in VS PRO?

 

Hi there, is there a possibility to rename the biome types (like : default, boreal forest......)? Cheers!

 

Hi. You would have to change the enum in the code. The biome types was made fixed for a reason. Some tools like RAM and others create biome masks for rivers, roads etc. It is important that they map to any pre made river and road biomes from other providers.

Lennart

 

The billboard atlas uses an override shader to render an unlit version of the tree from many angles. If you have a tree shader with a color tint that will by default not be applied to the atlas. What you can do is duplicate the billboard atlas shader, edit it to add your color modifications. Then create a shader controller class for your shader that will assign the new billboard shader.

Lennart

 

Yes. There is no 100% solution. One possibility is to use the scene vegetation baker component to temporary bake out rocks to the scene and make an obstacle mask. This can help you stop placing trees on rocks.

terrain textures created with noise and mapping rocks/trees to different is an option.

All the run-time spawned vegetation is rendered in parallell in jobs and they do not know of each other when spawning. I have tried a few approaches but not found a solution I am happy with and fast enough.
Another issue is that the next cells will in many case not be loaded when spawning. Large rocks/trees can overlap the edges and those are not accessable for testing.

I have been looking at an approach for neighbour cells but that requires a redesign of the spawning code. This can not be done without changing the current results and that would break games in design that relays on the fixed output from a set seed and rules..

My current idea is to make a post process system for the persistent storage. This woul be a editor process and does not matter if it uses a bit of time for the math. Basically spawning all cells to the storage and then processing overlap and removing collisions.
Not sure how this will end out.

Saw you asked about the obstacle mask. This should work good, but you need to bake the rocks with colliders to the scene with the SceneVegetationBaker compoent.

If you have more questions message me on the discord server. I try as much as possible to keep support to one channel. It is also a good place to get ideas. Big server and good community.

Lennart

 

I wanted to quickly try 2019.2.9f1 with HDRP and couldn't be bothered to plant that dense vegetation on my own







^^ VS Pro + Meadow Environment HDRP + Easy Roads 3D

 

That looks really cool! How did you manage to make the grass/terrain details to work with HDRP? As far as I know, even VSPro doesn't support it yet.

 

It's not grass, it's only plants and trees. Can't wait for real HDRP support.

 

Please don't ask about the why, the scenery just happened

All the plants, trees and rocks were distributed using Vegetation Studio Pro Biomes.

 

The awesome Forest Environment by NatureManufacture doesn't have Biomes yet for Vegetation Studio Pro, so I started creating them myself.

In case you want to try yourself, I recommend loading the demo that comes with Forest Environment, add Vegetation Studio Pro and iteratively replace textures, grass, plants, trees and objects while trying to get a similar look. It's good training

 

Looks good, how do you get the forest so dark and yet outside looks bright.

I have created a forest and mountain area but don't really want to add seperate Post Processing for each type of forest.

Using a global Post Processing if I set the main environment lighting the forests are too light. So if I darken the forests the main environment is too dark.

I actually have a post processing on the forest but the mountain area (second image below) is part of the main biome so darkening it separately is not doable from my perspective.

Any ideas?

 

Did you increase the shadow distance? By default it's 300 which is not enough for a forest. I have mine set to 3000. By the way, I also activated shadow on grass and plants in VS Pro. And in my scene is fog. Actually it's a left-over from the original scene done by NatureManufacture. I really recommend you start with his demo scene and build from there just for simple learning by doing. He's really a pro at what he does.

 

Thanks for the response I was being skimpy with shadows to save FPS. But that was a habit from earlier environments.

I know the scenes he does are completely awesome.

 

you could also decrease your ambient lightning .. should do the trick

 

Thanks Sarum.

I set the general ambient lighting according to the night time otherwise its too dark at night. I wil have to contact the developer of enviro to see if there is a way around that. But thanks for the suggestion an push in the right direction. This does seem like a good place to start.

Much appreciated.

 

I installed VS Pro on 2019.2.9 and got a bunch of errors. One thing that i did note from the directions was that i couldn't locate the Collection or Jobs packages. I found the Mathematics and Burst just fine... i think the errors were collections related... help! Thanks!

 

I believe the collections package contains jobs.So I think you just install: Burst, Mathematics, Collections and Post Processing?

 

All you need to install is Entities. The rest of the packages are installed implicitly because of their dependencies. And you need to set .Net from 2.0 to 4.0.

 

You also need to add a Density Volume. It makes all the difference.

 

Thanks Rowlan,m that will help I believe but I'm also in contact with enviro developer for solutions, but the Density Volume seems like it will help some. (I actually never heard of its existence so thanks.

 

Ah yes thats right, I forgot about that and thought it was the collections package. My bad.

 

Thanks but Ive been looking to add density volumes and seems its an HDRP feature which I havent upgraded to as last time I checked VSPro wasntr compatible or CTS (one or the other).

Il look into it again soon, thanks,

 

I was asked about the performance in my recent videos, so here you go:

Please be aware, that VS Pro doesn't support HDRP yet and everything is a mesh, especially the grass. I didn't bother to optimize anything, that scenery was done within 4 hours. Once you have the Biomes, you're set. VS Pro is awesome

 

Hi there!
Can VS pro handle an ongoing project? We have a Terrain tile with Speedtree painted on it and I was wondering if VS pro could continue with that terrain piece, or if we'd have to start over from scratch.

And also, does VSP improve upon SpeedTree's visuals?

 

I upgraded my Standard VS to VSPro no problem, but cant remember the process. I may have had to delete VS and start afresh I'm not so sure now.

I dont think it would increase the visuals although Im not sure.

I purchased a SpeedTree pack a few years ago and have never used them as they completly trash the projects performance wise, but I admit that was a while ago now and maybe they I could get them better. It was before Unity Multi Tile terrains became available which also sped up the project.

Back to VSP Pro I believe I deleted the VS Standard Package and went through the setup process for VSPro (tutorials at their website). And started afresh because of the feature to create biomes. Same project and terrain, different version of VS.

Bt the way, my project was an open world where speedtree were just too greedy so I used nature manufacturer trees now,

 

Thanks for the reply Hawk! But I was actually wondering about a terrain without VS. We used the standard terrain tree painting for the world and are looking to optimize the performance.

And it turns out the speedtree 8 shader doesn't really like deferred linear. The meshes get these weird looking shiny white reflections because of how the shader works. If VSP has a custom shader that could correct that, that would be awesome.

 

Sure, Im no expert, I just thought I would add what I have experienced. If its performance then VSPro is awesome. It basically culls everything other than the field of view. Im able to have loads of vegetation on a massive terrain and it is more performant than the standard painter. In my experience that is. Best wait for Lennart to respond, hes the man who knows. Good luck with it.

 

Hi @LennartJohansen ,

sorry for the late reply. I have checked your recommendation for solving the intersection issue with the obstacle masks and it worked very well, so thank you for the hint!
As I am an absolute newbie, it was not trivial to find out the right configuration, but I managed it and if someone has the same issues, here a step-by-step description about the activation of obstacle masks, for newbies like me...

How to avoid intersections between rocks and grass/trees in VS PRO, using obstacle mask textures.
Step-by-step description (for newbies)​

1. Under «Edit Biomes», configure your rocks and similar objects (such as tree stumps) as «Objects» and «Large Objects».
   
   
2. Under «Edit Biomes», activate colliders for all your objects / large-objects (and trees if you want).
   Repeat this for all biomes.
   
   
   
   
3. Configure layers in your scene for the vegetation items, using the «Layers» button and selecting «Edit layers». Example setup:
   
   
   
   Make sure that your vegetation items (especially Objects and Large-Objects) are rendered in its own layers. Configure the layers under the «Render» tab of Vegetation System Pro, as shown here:
   
   
   
   
4. At the «Collider System Pro» area under «Vegetation System Pro», select «Navmesh» tab, activate the «Set static» checkbox and click on the «Bake colliders to scene» button. This will create all colliders as GameObjects in your scene (see «Baked colliders_XXXXXX»).
   
   
   
   
5. For the game-object that has VegetationSystemPro component (a.k.a the game-object «VegetationSystemPro» under «VegetationStudioPro»), click on «Add Component» in the inspector and select «Obstacle Mask Creator» script:
   
   
   
   
   Select a resolution under «Settings» and click on «Snap to terrain» or «Snap to world area» depending on your needs.
   At «Obstacle layers» select «Objects» and «Large Objects». Note that we want to eliminate intersections between rocks (+ similar objects such as tree stumps) and grass/trees. So the obstacle map that will be generated should contain only objects/large-objects.
   Increase the «Minimum distance» if you want to keep some distance between your rocks and grass/trees.
   Then press the «Generate obstacle mask» button. Select a file in the save-dialog and save the generated image under your project. If you view this image with an image-viewer directly, you should see many small black areas that represent your objects on the terrain/world.
   
   (Continued in the next post)

 

6. Click on the generated obstacle-map image-file in Unity, in order to activate the inspector view. Make sure that you set the physical image size under «Max Size», and set the option «RGBA 32 bit» under «Format». Note that currently, for obstacle maps, only RGBA32 format is supported in VS PRO.
With these settings, your texture is ready to use as obstacle map in VS PRO.



7. Go to the «Texture Masks» tab in VegetationSystemPro and for each biome, click on «Add mask group» and under «Add texture mask» drag your generated obstacle map image into the Texture2D slot. Click on «Snap to terrain» or «Snap to world area», depending on the size of the map at generation time.
You can also add a name to this obstacle-map texture.
Repeat this step for all biomes.



8. Go to the «Edit biomes» area and select the vegetation item that you want to mask out: these are normally the grass, plant and tree items, as you don´t want these to intersect with your objects/large-objects (i.e. rocks).
Navigate to the «Texture mask rules» section and select the checkbox «Use texture mask include rules». Make sure that you see the name of your obstacle map that was configured in step 7.
Then click on the «Add new rule» button. This will add your obstacle-map texture to this vegetation item, i.e. black pixels on this texture map indicate no-spawn areas.
Repeat the step for all your grass / tree items in all biomes.



9. You can then remove the generated collider GameObjects from your scene.

10. That´s it. If you start the scene, you shouldn´t see any intersections between rocks and grass/trees.

 

Everytime I set the layers everything disappears. But I will try it again just in case. thanks for the post, will come in useful later.

I just tested and they actually work fine now.

 

Hi, I haven issue... or rather I am wondering about how the Bake Colliders To Scene feature works and the benefits.

If for example I have Biome Veg Items set up as image below.



Then on the Collider System Pro script I click the Bake Colliders To Scene button and the resulting game objects are present in the scene...



If I then Bake The Navmesh as normal.... and delete the generated collider game objects from scene...

Will all of the generated Collider Game Objects then act as a colliders? through the NaveMesh?

I mean... can I then remove the collider from the game objects in my Biome Settings.

So in effect the colliders are bakes into the nav mesh and not the Vegetation Biome settings for a particular rock, tree or other object?

If this is so... then will it help performance?

Hope that makes sense, and thanks.

ADDITION: And then If I bake the navmesh again I presume that will destroy the navmesh colliders and the above process will need to be redone? Thanks