[Released] Vegetation Studio Pro

If the product is amazing and runs very well, 75$ would be a cheap price.

 

I dont know what the price is, but I did not get 1st VS, but I am planning to get VS pro. looks awesome!! and new Unity tech!!

Thank you!!

 

I will decide the final price soon and post here. Current users of Vegetation Studio can upgrade with only the price difference between the 2 assets. There will be a release discount on top of this.

Lennart

 

Awesome!! Thank you!!

 

New camera mode.

Hi.

I added a new camera mode: Render billboards only.
This can be usefull when setting up reflection cameras for water.

• Add the reflection camera to the Vegetation system
• Select "render direct to camera" on both the main camera and this
• Select "render billboards only" on the reflection camera

This way the water reflections will only reflect tree billboards and not the mesh vegetation. This is much faster to render at the cost of some detail in the water reflections.

Lennart

 

Development update.

Hi. I am preparing a new update. It will be ready to download today or tomorrow.
The persistent storage and manual painting tools is ready and included.

Next on the list is the collider system.

Improvements

• Added PersistentVegetationStoragePackage scriptable object
• Added PersistentVegetation Stoage
• Render billboards only mode on cameras. Good for water reflection cameras etc.
• Added Refresh Vegetation button om inspector. This will refresh all heightmaps and clear cache. For manual refresh after 3rd party tools changes

Changes

• Updates to UnityTerrain component to access the splatmaps befor CTS removes them to remove render passes. This requires a CTS update that is comming.
• API changes to VegetationCellSpawner class. Multiple variants of SpawnVegetationCell exposed.
• Added warning if multiple cameras are added and render direct to camera is not selected
• Billboards now render with individual MaterialPropertyBlocks per camera.
• Update some UI help texts
• Internal changes to reduce memory use for vegetation.

Fixes

• TextureMaskType on TextureMaskGroup did not serialize
• Fixed missing namespace on ScriptableObjectUtiliy making a conflict with some devdogs tools
• Fixed problem with wind samplers not set up correctly when adding cameras run-time
• Fixed problem with camera compute buffers not set up when adding cameras run-time
• Fixed 2 inline out variable declarations that needed c# 7.0+
• Added fix for some tree billboards generated with an artifact at the top. Needs billboard regeneration
• Fixed EnableRuntimeSpawn not working correct for billboards

Lennart

 

Persistent Vegetation Storage

The persistent storage is now finished. It has all the functionality from standard Vegetation Studio except for the importers. Those I will add in a couple of weeks when the collider system is finished.

You can not create a single storage for all the terrains added to a Vegetation System and store vegetation from multiple biomes/vegetation packages.

Baking to the storage is much faster than before thanks to the job system/burst spawning.

Manual painting is also a bit more responsive since Vegetation Studio Pro can clear the cache for a single item only. Billboard mesh generation is also done in jobs.

Since there is a common storage for multiple terrain it will be possible to bake trees to the storage that will show correct in the distance even if you swap out UnityTerrains with MeshTerrains in the distance.

I will update the beta tomorrow with this included.

 

Beta update

Beta 0.7.0.1 is now avalable for download.

Lennart

 

In light of 2018.3's terrain improvements, are there any performance comparisons and why would people pick VS pro over a native solution? I ask because it seems like the sort of question I should ask

Apparently there's been some draw call optimisations an new speed tree support.

 

The 2018.3 terrain changes are for the terrain itself. They made an instanced render mode that now generates the dynamic mesh on the GPU from a heightmap in a RenderTexture. All this will benefit scenes with terrain. with Vegetation Studio also.

As far as I know there is no bigger changes to any vegetation rendering. Add 20-30 000+ mesh trees, grass or plants to a unity terrain and it starts to use huge amounts of CPU. The billboarded grass on unity terrain is not slow but does not look good, mesh grass is much more flexible and better looking.

Vegetation Studio/Pro does not use any of the unity terrain features for vegetation rendering. It has its own culling system that runs on jobs/burst. uses instanced and instanced indirect rendering. GPU frustum culling and LOD selection etc. This in additon to run-time masking system, procedural generation, biomes etc.

VS pro also supports mesh terrains.

Unity did a change to the speedtree rendering. They now keep the LOD_FADE_PERCENTAGE keyword active all the time to get less batches. Before there was an additional drawcall for for trees not close to the fade distance.

Vegetation Studio has been doing this manually for both instanced and indirect rendering since 2018.1.
When rendering instanced you need to handle the LODfade calculation manually and inject the result.

The general issue with Unity terrains is still the same. It does not scale well. As you keep adding in vegetation meshes it slows down drastically.

Lennart

 

I'm having a strange problem with baldinoboy's Tropical Forest Pack trees in VS Pro. Basically when I have a directional light pointing at the side of the trees that I'm looking at with the camera (sun is angled behind the player pointing at the trees), they appear darker than when the directional light is pointing at the opposite side (sun is in front of the player angled behind the trees). It's kind of hard to explain but it's like the lighting is backwards on them. It's very noticeable when you see the trees on a dark part of the terrain that's in shadow because the sun is angled behind the terrain, and the trees are lit up. This only happens when the trees are placed through vs pro though, if I place one manually onto the terrain everything looks fine. I took screenshots to show what is happening:


In this first picture the sun is angled behind the camera facing the trees, the red circled tree is the one I placed manually, the others are placed through vs pro.



In this picture the sun is ahead of the camera angled behind the trees


With a speedtree, however, everything seems normal with the lighting:


I circled red the tree I placed manually on the terrain


So yea something weird is going on, the normal maps also just seem kind of out-of-whack on the tropical forest pack tree, the shadowing is like erratic and strange looking. I tried this using the VS profile and VS billboards that come with the tropical forest pack, and it still does the same thing. I also made a new project with just VS Pro and the Tropical Forest Pack to test it.

 

Looks like Skyrim. Amazing!

 

Development update.

Hi. I am doing good progress on the collider system. The instance selection system that will decide what trees and rocks that is close enough to a camera is working. It was a bit of work to support multi camera setups with overlapping viewports but it is supported now.

All the selection and culling is done in a single job chain, including the last filter pass that gives the collider system the events for what colliders to create/destroy. The selection process is really fast.

It will allow for per item settings for the distance to have colliders.

The same selection core will be used on the run-time prefab spawner.

A change from standard Vegetation Studio is that I plan to store the run-time prefab settings in the vegetation package/biome files making it easier to apply this on new terrains.

Image below does not show much, but these boxes will soon be colliders and effect prefabs from the run-time prefab spawner.

Lennart

 

Hi. I am traveling for a few days now but I will install and test with the latest tropical forest pack when back to the office later next week.

Lennart

 

Ok no problem, sounds good thanks

 

More collider system.

Doing good progress on the collider system.
GUI on the Vegetation Items is ready.
Pooling system is working and I can create collider not all types are done but there is a new FromPrefab mode that allows you to use the original colliders from the tree/rock prefab.

This might be a bit overkill in some cases. but possible now.

This will be included in the next update.

Lennart

 

Next few days.

Hi. I will be out of the office traveling until Friday. I will try to follow up on forums but response might be slow.

Lennart

 

Hey Lennart,

first of all, the performance of vegetation studio pro is out of this world. I can't wait until instanced indirect is working for trees, but even then I've experienced amazing gains in terms of performance.

I've noticed an issue though, I don't know if you are already aware of it:
Depending on the camera's position sometimes the grass/plants and some mesh trees completely disappear and only get visible again if the camera is moved to another position. If you would like me to, I'll try to replicate the issue in an empty project.
I'm currently on 2018.2.10f1 using mostly the nature manufacture assets in combination with 100 1*1km terrains.
Vegetation loads in nicely and billboards always render correctly, only the actual meshes disappear and reappear when moving through mesh-vegetation.

I created a quick video of the issue for you:

It is related to the camera's distance to vegetation instances, driving on streets where no vegetation is spawned on the street with mesh vegetation to both sides does not lead to this problem. Only when you actually are standing in or driving through vegetation this happens. Maybe I just set something up wrong, however, I wouldn't know which setting would lead to this issue.

Regards,
Ben

 

It seems to be some culling issue. Do you think you can replicate it in a project for me. It should be easy to fix if I can replicate the issue.

If you turn on the vegetation cells on the debug tab. Do they look correct? do they follow the terrain?

Lennart

 

The Cells look fine to me. After some playing around I'm now seeing this error:

Code (CSharp):

1. IndexOutOfRangeException: Index was outside the bounds of the array.
2. AwesomeTechnologies.VegetationSystem.VegetationSystemPro.RenderVegetationItemLOD (Unity.Collections.NativeList`1[T] matrixList, Unity.Collections.NativeList`1[T] lodFadeList, AwesomeTechnologies.VegetationSystem.VegetationItemModelInfo vegetationItemModelInfo, System.Int32 lodIndex, UnityEngine.Camera targetCamera, System.Int32 cameraIndex, UnityEngine.Rendering.ShadowCastingMode shadowCastingMode, UnityEngine.LayerMask layer) (at Assets/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudioPro/Runtime/VegetationSystemPro/VegetationSystemPro.cs:932)
3. AwesomeTechnologies.VegetationSystem.VegetationSystemPro.RenderInstancedVegetation () (at Assets/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudioPro/Runtime/VegetationSystemPro/VegetationSystemPro.cs:855)
4. AwesomeTechnologies.VegetationSystem.VegetationSystemPro.LateUpdate () (at Assets/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudioPro/Runtime/VegetationSystemPro/VegetationSystemPro.cs:671)

I guess it somehow didn't load all the materials correctly and will not show some lod levels? However I did test this with Lods for the trees turned on and off and the problem persisted.

Edit: I stepped through the code real quick and it seems that it's sometimes missing a material for a submesh. For example on the fir_06 forest lod0 I have 3 submeshes, yet the materials array that is used with drawmeshinstanced() only has two materials.
It seems that the cheap versions of the naturemanufacture trees only have 2 materials for 3 submeshes, if I'm seeing this correctly.
Maybe just do something like

Code (CSharp):

1. for(int m = 0; m< materials.length; m++)

, or could that cause other issues?

 

Does it work on Mac?

I just download 7.1 beta and I get this error after importing

Assembly has reference to non-existent assembly 'Unity.Postprocessing.Runtime' (Assets/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudioPro/Runtime/AwesomeTechnologies.VegetationStudioPro.Runtime.asmdef)


I have post processing installed 2.0.13 preview on unity 2018.3b4


EDIT: I fixed it by manually connecting the post processing runtime

 

Is the issue Tree Colliders vs. Object Colliders fixed with Vegetation Studio Pro, now that you are working on colliders?


In the past you wrote this:
The collision detection on trees is using an internal grid system to detect collision. It currently only works on trees. The colliders are not used for this detection. Raycasting is currently to slow and only single threaded, but it looks like the Job system might open up for this soon...

Without getting this fixed it's pretty useless to use dynamic spawning because you need to bake and check every tree and object anyway.

Cheers
Ronny

 

An error like this could break the render loop and you would loose vegetation like you see in the video. I will add some extra testing. I guess the code assumes there are materials for each submesh as it should be.

Could you send me a pm with the prefab that makes the problem?

Lennart

 

Did you have the post processing installed from the package manager or direct from git?

Lennart

 

Hi Ronny.

I think I will finish the collider system this weekend. Then I add the run-time prefab spawner.
When these 2 last bigger features are inn I will do the collision system between items. It will have an priority of trees over large objects and objects since these needs to be spawned at a much larger distance for billboards. I do not want to have to spawn rocks also at this distance to see if they collide with a tree.

Lennart

 

I had one from git before and after deleting it and connecting to the package manager version is was working

 

Good. I will make sure to add that to the manual.

Lennart

 

This sounds awesome and totally understandable. The main issue to not see rocks spawned on the same place like a tree so they collide is only important on close distance. As far this works for the view distance of rocks or other objects I think thats totally sufficient and great.

Cheers
Ronny

 

Render loop fix.

@XOA_Productions
I have added a fix for the issues you got. The render loop will now handle meshes with more submeshes than materials.
The submeshes with no material will just be skipped while the others renders as normal. I think this will fix your "culling" issues that was actually the renderloop stopping for the missing material.

Will be in the next beta early next week.

Lennart

 

Forward rendering and multiple lights

The included grass shader and speedtree shader now supports instanced addpass for multiple lights when rendering in forward mode.

I also updated the github repo with info for 3rd party shaders to support this. You can find the link here.

In Vegetation Studio Pro there is a shader controller system that allows for additional 3rd party control of shader behaviour, UI and serialization.

The Speedtree shader has an included controller like this. It will by default replace the original speedtree shader with a custom one for Vegetation Studio supporting instanced indirect and this new multi light changes. This happens run-time and does no changes to the UI.

Lennart

 

Development update.

Hi. I finished the collider system and will be releasing a Beta 0.8 tomorrow. Next update after this should have the run-time prefab spawner and a demo scene. I am also starting the documentation and guide job.

Here is the changelog.

Lennart

Improvements

Added collider system with the following features

• Individual distance per object
• Multi camera support with overlapping viewpoints
• Primitive collider setup
• Use colliders from source prefab
• Pooling system
• Culling and visibility testing done in jobs/burst
• NavmeshObstacle component as option

Other improvements

• Added OnAddCamera and OnRemoveCamera delegates to VegetationSystemPro
• Added a selectable label on the VegetationPackage inspector to get easy access to the VegetationItemID of any item
• Added NormalStrength setting to billboards
• New billboard generation setting that allows you to regenerate the normals used for generation and/or blend between original and new normals
• Added delegates for all OnClearCache function on VegetationSystemPro class
• Added forwardadd additional light passes for the included speedtree shader. This should give multi light support in forward mode.
• Added forwardadd additional light passes for the included speedtree shader
• Updated github repo with info on how to add the forwardadd pass to other shaders. https://github.com/AwesomeTechnologies/Vegetation-Studio-Instanced-Indirect/blob/master/README.md

Fixes

• Fix for baked vegetation in the persistent storage not rendering instanced indirect
• Fix for nativeArray not disposed on the PolygonMaskArea
• Fix for error if a prefab is missing a mesh. It will be replaced with an empty mesh now
• Fix for error in render loop if the perfab is har more submeshes than materials

 

Hiya,

Our terrain is around 3 miles or so, what would be your recommendations for maximum performance? any tips here will be welcome, and I'm planning on givving VS pro a whirl to see how it goes. By tips I mean how to get the most performance vs density. I need thick grass but I'm not very fussy about how controlled it is. It would be fine to only spawn it where there is a specific splat or something like that.

Also welcome any general purpose 2018.3 terrain optimisation tips you might have - we're in the process of removing our old mesh stuff and trying the new stuff

Do you store every grass position? seems awfully expensive in memory and perf. If that's the case I could probably just use the system for rock/bush/tree (larger things) and use a simple shader to render grass that's pooled based on a map... just asking as don't know your approach.

Planning to put it in soon but I'm on HDRP - and I can wait if your support for that is not ready yet - it's only visuals and there's still other work to be doing.

Thanks!

 

Hi. Hippo

Vegetation Studio Pro supports multiple terrains. if you use one or more terrains does not really matter for the vegetation render speed. When you start up the vegetation system it sets up the internal cell structure for the total area of all terrains and a cell can include multiple terrains at overlap areas.

Try to use shaders that support instanced indirect for grass. This is faster for rendering since you do not have the 1023 per batch that instancing have. Culling is also on the GPU and you save waiting time to copy the instances every frame to the GPU.

Enable the distance falloff rule for grass. this will do a frame by frame viewpoint dependent grass patch reduction in the distance to lower overdraw. Hard to see and good results.

The new terrain improvements works out of the box with VS Pro. Reading the heightmap data is faster, but the big improvements are not directly related to vegetation rendering. There is a instanced mode on the terrain that lowers CPU use and drawcalls drastically. But this needs a terrain shader that supports it. Terrain shaders now have to calculate the vertex position in the shader and they also have access to a per pixel normalmap for better normals.

The default settings for vegetation is spawn on demand. The first time you see a new area it schedules a range of jobs that based on a seed and all rules spawnes the vegetation. This is setup in update and finished at the end of LateUpdate. The main thread is free for normal work while this happens. The speed of the jobs with burst is great and this goes wide on all cores.

There is also a persistent storage. You can bake all instances to this if you want, but it is optional. For large terrains run-time spawning is better.

Still waiting for the SRPs to become a bit more stable but I have a plan to experiment with some custom nodes soon for the needed shaders.

Lennart

 

Beta update.

Beta 0.8.0.0 is now available for download. It contains all the changes in my earlier post.

Lennart

 

Excellent speed gains overall; it's more or less plain sailing. Thanks, Lennart!

However, colliders only seem to work on trees as yet. Is that correct? Can't get it to work on objects.

 

I added a mesh collider to a rock now, that seems to work. It is added as an object.
You can turn on show colliders on the collider system to see the colliders as you configure.

Do you not get up the collider settings for objects?

Lennart

 

I've added the component to the vegetation system, then turned on colliders in the Edit Biome pane using the new, very detailed settings. It seems to work for trees, though I get no visual feedback despite that feature being turned on. Metal, Mac.

Is there anything else that needs to be done?

 

There is a checkbox on the ColliderSystem component to show colliders. Select this and you should be able to select the colliders in the hierarchy and see them. Also colliders only show up in playmode.

if it still does not work, send me a PM and we can debug.

Lennart

 

Run-time prefab spawner

Hi. I have finished the UI work on the run-time prefab spawner.
It uses the same VegetationItem selection framework as the collider system. I think I should be able to finish it in a few days. Prefabs initiated by this will by default be using a pooling system and disabled/enabled between use but this can be disabled if prefabs does not work with pooling.

All rules are saved in the biome/vegetation package to make it easy to re-use this on other scenes/terrains.

Lennart

 

Not sure if this has been asked before... I have always been curious, what is the qualification or
differences for Large Objects to Objects ? Like say a prefab of a 3DForge house as example of object ..

 

Just 2 categories for you to group things. The only main difference in pro is that the base distance for large objects is the same as mesh trees and for objects it is vegetation distance.
But in pro you can set a distance factor on each item if you want to lower it from this.

While you could render a single mesh house as a large object you will get a lot of popping when culled.

Lennart

 

Thank you, I did get the popping of the houses. Am looking forward to this pro version. Do you have a general
idea of possible release ? like dec / jan ? just curious.

 

November/desember

Lennart

 

I guess this also depends whether it's a per seat license. With a per seat license and 10 people on the team, it would be 750$ rather than 75$ only.

 

I will post price with upgrade price in about a week+ when I have prepared a bit more materials for it.
Estimated release date also

Lennart

 

Collider issue

Hi. We discovered a small logic error on the collider system. Objects will only spawn colliders where the camera was when enabled. I will try to post a patch update tomorrow. Trees work as normal

EDIT: 0.8.0.1 patch release on the server.

Lennart

 

Hi @LennartJohansen -- now that you're getting closer to release, I've come back to look at the Vegetation Studio Pro integration again. You've been making great progress!

Couple of things I've noticed today, which could be down to me, but I'l let you know in case:

• Camera:
  • I'm using additive scenes, so my terrain is in a different scene from the main camera setup and systems. Also perhaps worth noting that I'm working in VR with SteamVR. So I cannot connect cross-scene references (as expected) so am manually adding the main VR camera to the `VegetationSystemPro` class.
  • Your system is also trying to add the camera automatically, however for some reason fails and an empty camera ends up on the `VegetationSystemPro` class. So with me adding my own camera manually there end up being two cameras and the vegetation does not render.
  • So I wait a frame, remove the empty camera and then things render correctly. It would perhaps be nice to have a manual override to disable the automatic camera addition, although I'm not sure if that would mess something else up (not fully understanding the inner workings of your complex system).
• Render mode:
  • Works great for me in `Instanced` mode, however when switching to `Instanced Direct` my trees (SpeedTree) turn dark, so something is not quite right. I tried refreshing the prefab, however that didn't make any difference.
  • Related to that -- in the editor Statistics the items being rendered in `Instanced Direct`mode do not show up on the Unity stats?

// WildStyle

 

1. I will look at the empty camera added. It should not happen.
2. I will add a setting to disable looking for a camera
3. Are you in forward or deferred? multiple realtime lights? could you send me a PM with a screenshot? we can debug there?
4. Instanced indirect stats does not show and will not. Unity does not know how many instances is rendered. It is all in a GPU buffer and never synced to the CPU when rendering instanced indirect.

Lennart

 

Helper component

Hi.

I added a small helper component to Vegetation Studio Pro. It can help you to make merged meshes of trees that is made out of multiple meshes with a material on each.

Lennart

 

Run-time prefab spawner

The run-time prefab spawner component is ready and will be in the next update.
I am planning the update for tomorrow.

It has a built in pooling system and a per item distance setting.
All settings is saved in the Vegetation package/biome for easy re-use of biomes in new projects.

This is the last big feature I am adding for the 1.0 release in asset store. Next on the list is some smaller fixes and changes. documentation and a demo scene.

Lennart