[Released] Vegetation Studio Pro

Speedtrees slowly lerp to the new wind settings. it takes some time before you see changes.

They are using the HD wind. That is the new wind algortithm added in the HD SRP.

Lennart

 

Hello, I've been using the old version of Vegetation Studio for some time now so I've had a few older Persistent Vegetation Packages associated with that version that I've been using with all my scenes. I just updated to Pro today and it doesn't seem like I'm able to use the older packages/storage with the new system at all.

Is this actually the case or am I just missing a way to convert/use them with Pro?

Thank you for any response.

 

Hi. have a look here. Got the same question yesterday. Working on it now

Lennart

 

I see, I'm sorry, I must've missed that when going through the thread! Thank you, good to know it's coming soon!

 

Hi @LennartJohansen thanks for checking the raycast issue again, I'm definitely looking forward to when Unity finally releases a fix for it. Also, would this fix allow "Biome Mask Areas" to work under overhangs too (I assume yes). Other than that glad to see VS Pro on the market I just updated to pro a couple hours ago, keep up the great work!

 

Yes that sounds about right, I wasn't too bothered just there wasn't and indicator as to whether I was receiving a discount (and if there is a discount I wanna know!!! ) or not, any way, id like to thank you for a wonderful asset Lennart!

 

I bought the pro version. but after reading some things on here I"m thinking I should wait before I import it?
Until you fix a issue?

 

Hi. Not sure what you are refering to.
There is no breaking bugs I know of. I got some minor issues reported but those are fixed and will be in the next update.

I am working on an "export format" that will help a bit when converting old vegetation packages but that only saves you some configuration. That will also allow you to move instances stored in a persistent storage.

Lennart

 

Hi.

"There is a new multi terrain setup for Vegetation Studio Pro. It allows you to define a larger world area and then load/unload terrain within this area. Since the initialization is already done it is much faster to just invalidate the area for the loaded terrain and spawn this on demand"

Just to clarify:

1. The new VS Pro multi terrain supports the new Unity Multi Terrain in 2018.3?
2. Your load / unload terrain can be a substitute of worldStreamer (NatureManufacture)? I was considering stream my terrain with worldStreamer but maybe it's not necessary as now I can do it with VS Pro?
Thanks!

 

Hi.
1. The new multi terrain features in 2018.3 is actually 2 features. There is a editor tool that helps you to set up new terrains by clicking in the terrain and it also has a new auto connect feature that lets the terrain know of the neighbour to not get cracks between terrains when the dynamic LOD is calculated. Vegetation Studio Pro works good with these new terrain features.

2. The load/unload terrain feature of Vegetation Studio pro allows you to add and remove terrains to a ready initialized Vegetation System. This gives faster init for the vegetation since the internal structure is already set up. Vegetation Studio does not do any of the loading/unloading of the terrains. How you load or create new terrains is up to you.

It does not replace the functionality of Worldstreamer, but should work good with the scenes systems like worldstreamer create and load.

Lennart

 

One more thing: you mention that for the new 2018.3 Terrain GPU Instance system to work, (lowers CPU use and drawcalls drastically) But this needs a terrain shader that supports it. Do NatureManufacture shaders accomplish that?
I'm referring especially the new pack "Meadow Environment" and the CTS pack.
I was thinking to buy Vegetation Studio Pro + Meadow Environment + CTS Pack and I wanted to know if everything can benefit from the new 2018.3 terrain improvements.

 

Hi. again

Vegetation rendering in Vegetation Studio Pro is done separate from the terrain and using instancing. Vegetation Studio is not affected by the terrain render mode or shader used.

The Meadow Environment package have support for Vegetation Studios instanced indirect rendering.

I do not know if CTS has added support for the new terrain instanced mode yet. You would have to ask on the CTS forum

Lennart

 

if using the new multi terrain setup for Vegetation Studio Pro, does it have any limitations on the size of the multi-terrain? Wondering if it handles the issue of floating point precision and if so how? if not, what do you think the terrain size limits are that vs-pro can handle?

 

Hi.

Floating origin is handled internally by Vegetation Studio Pro.

On the settings tab there is a Floating Origin Anchor setting. Assign the root Transform of the objects you shift position on for floating origin. All the vegetation will then follow the origin offset. There is a 0 cost to changing floating origin as the offset is added in the last pass in the render list preparation job or the compute shader pass depending on if you render instanced or instanced indirect.

For larger worlds the number of internal cells set up at initialization will be bigger, but this should not affect rendering speed. Cells are spawned on demand when visible and it is the vegetation density and visible range that affects the rendering speed not the size of unused cells in the distance.

Lennart

 

Hi,

I just updated to VS Pro. I just started using it but really, this is a GREAT ASSET! I have two questions if you don't mind:
Is it compatible with the "mountain trees dynamic nature asset"? When using some prefabs I loose all my other instances of plants , rocks etc... deleting the prefab make it work again. Other prefab in the "mountain trees dynamic nature asset" works but do not come with the shaders. So the trees have no textures.

In the edit biomes set up there is a pull down menu to select a whole bunch of biomes (vegetation studio presets). Selecting them doesn't do anything except if I select the one I created. Is there a reason for those biomes to be there? Are they link to extra assets that we should buy?

Thanks for the support.

 

Hi.

1. The mountain tree asset has a separate folder with Vegetation Studio prefabs.

2. The biomes you see in the list there are biome categories. For when you make your own biome.
Lets say you want to make a forest biome to use in some areas of your terrain. You create a vegetationPackage/biome and select the forest biome type. When you then add BiomeMaskAreas you select the same biome type (forest) for the mask and the biome is used in this area.

Having pre defined biome categories also helps for 3rd party tools. RAM or Cascade will create river or lake biome mask areas automatic and if you have a lake or river biome added to your Vegetation System it will be used automatic.

Another use case is post processing. Vegetation Studio Pro can create post process volumes for biome mask areas automatic (on the VegetationStudioManager component) and here you could have ready profiles for different biomes and assign them.

The biome categories are designed this way to make it easy to swap out vegetation packages. Replace one forest package with another for seasons or testing. This is why a Biome Area mask has a cartegory and is not assigned to a spesific vegetation package.

Another think to remember is that you need a default biome on the terrain. This is the biome that will be used everywhere you do not have Biome Area masks. This could be an empry package if you only want vegetation within mask areas.

Lennart

 

Very clever! Biomes categories will be very useful.

Thanks for the quick reply.

 

Hi @LennartJohansen

I bought VS Pro and I was starting with it. And I have some doubts:

1) I followed the setup guide to prepare a new project for VS Pro. I follow all the steps (Scripting Runtime Version to .Net 4.x Equivalent, Api compability level to .net 4.x, Select and install 5 packages) until I came to install Windows SDK and VC ++ toolkit from Visual Studio Installer ...

How can I know if I have the Windows SDK and VC ++ installed? I've been watching but I can not find out.

On the other hand when trying to install it, I simply open the VisualStudio Installer and can not find a way to find any add-ons to install them.

I suppose it may be because of what I just said or something I do not do well but I have done some tests and I do not get any performance gains between Vegetation Studio vs Vegetation Studio Pro.

I have tried in the test scene that you include in the package of your "DownloadedDemo" page and I have put the same configuration in both projects and this is the result:

Vegetation Studio Normal


Vegetation Studio Pro


I guess something is not doing well because the performance is almost identical. I thought that with the new improvements (job, etc, etc) it would improve a lot ...
You can help?

2) On the other hand, I wanted to ask you if the color that is generated in the billboards is an error or something is missing me. In the next video, you can see that the color of the billboards have very strange color tones and it does not look much like the color of the 3d trees, even some take a red color that has nothing to do with your 3d tree. It's the example scene and I still had not touched anything

Can you tell me what is the best way to generate more accurate billboards? I have played for quite some time with the values that are in the options of Bilboards (Tint color, specular brightness, etc, etc), but this does not solve the problem either
What should I do to improve billboards in quality and color?


3) Another thing, can a feature be added to VS Pro so that Shadows Distance is different for Grass, Trees, Plants, Billboards, etc?

I find myself in the event that I want the billboards to generate shadow, but that implies that I have to put the Shadow distance configuration of Unity very far away and this implies that everything else will also generate shadows up to that distance.

Is it possible in some way to make different objects have different Shadows distance? For example the grass that only draws shadows up to 30 meters, billboards up to 700 meters, etc, etc

regards

 

@LennartJohansen - congratulations on the release! My review is up on the asset store and frankly still surprised just how good this asset is. Should be built in (tm).

 

Thanks for the review. Glad you are happy with Vegetation Studio Pro.

Lennart

 

Certainly - I almost never use asset store assets because I'm *really* picky about quality. No problem here!

 

Hi.
1. The new multi terrain features in 2018.3 is actually 2 features. There is a editor tool that helps you to set up new terrains by clicking in the terrain and it also has a new auto connect feature that lets the terrain know of the neighbour to not get cracks between terrains when the dynamic LOD is calculated. Vegetation Studio Pro works good with these new terrain features.

2. The load/unload terrain feature of Vegetation Studio pro allows you to add and remove terrains to a ready initialized Vegetation System. This gives faster init for the vegetation since the internal structure is already set up. Vegetation Studio does not do any of the loading/unloading of the terrains. How you load or create new terrains is up to you.

It does not replace the functionality of Worldstreamer, but should work good with the scenes systems like worldstreamer create and load.



Wow, It is jut what I want to know.

I have another question.

LOD billbord. It is support like unreal's octa hedron billboard?

 

Hi. The billboard system in Vegetation Studio has 2 modes. A 2D mode that is sampled only around the Y axis. 8 or 16 samples and a 3D mode that is using a half dome spherical projection.

Speed is the same on both modes but the 2D mode uses less texture memory.

Below is a half dome version of a speedtree billboard. The colors around the tree is a alpha bleeding/padding added to remove any outline blending issues.

Lennart

 

Love your products. Working with VS for a while and it is simply one of the best products out there. Am purchasing pro in a few days but was wondering about having to start up a new project. Already have done a lot of work in a project using 2018.2.12, no way to just install it without starting a new one up?

 

You do not need a new project, but you do need to set up Vegetation Studio Pro and make new Vegetation Packages.
You also need to remove the old Vegetation Studio install. They can not be in the same project since they share a namespace to keep the API for 3rd party tools easy to update.

Take a backup

Set the .net 4.x as shows in the setup guide. Then install the 5 packages from the package manager.

I am working on a export format that can help move the vetetation items and instances in the persisten storage from old VS project to new but that is not ready yet. It will not transfer all the rules as some of them is done a bit differently in VS Pro but it will help you on the way.

Lennart

 

Hi. I think I missed your post yesterday. I did not see it before now.

1. To test if you have the windows SDK and VC++ installed you can try to do a build. Unity should give an error message when compiling if you do not have all the requirements. In the editor it should work without those 2.

About speed. The job system give you much faster spawning, this will reduce spikes when moving around, CPU use when adding a lot of trees, rocks etc that need shadow visibility testing, per item LOD etc. If you profile you will see that the CPU uses multiple cores and gives you more room to your game logic.

you will also see that all rule changes happens direct now in the editor, no waiting time after you move a slider.

The render loop itself is optimized in Vegetation Studio, the GPU usage should not change much between the version. The vegetation packages of the 2 demo scenes also have different settings and can not be compared direct

as you add more items and make complex scenes you will see that your CPU use is much better with jobs.

2. It almost looks like the billboards are generated for the wrong color model, linear/gamma. this should be handled automatic. Do you mind joing the discord server and message me there. We can debug together. Link in my signature.

3. Shadow distance is controlled by Unity and the quality settings. You can not change this per mesh.

Lennart

 

Thanks so much, I purposely did not install VS this time on this project since I was waiting for pro. Appreciate all your hard work and will leave a wonderful review when I purchase it on Monday. Thanks again mate. Cheers

 

I'm having trouble understanding how to use this with worldstreamer. How do we manually assign the terrain within vsp?

 

Also with vsp I can't bake and clear my vegetation anymore and states I have ran out of memory where in the original version I could. I also get an error where memory wasnt cleaned up I believe with a unity terrain script you have

 

I will make a small guide for multi terrain setups and post here later today.

Could you send me a private message with the error message? We can debug there.

Lennart

 

Could you add a way to mass remove terrains. I'm having to redo my whole vsp since I did a new split.

 

Sure. I will add a remove all terrain button.

Lennart

 

Development update.

I am preparing a new update for Vegetation Studio Pro. Some fixes and smaller features requested.
Among these are.

Tags on colliders



Billboards can now have separate layer settings.



Copy/paste on curves now copy tangent settings as they should.

'

You can now change the number of textures in a vegetation package.



Splatmap generation can now be disabled per biome. The biome area will keep the parent biome splatmap.



Lennart

 

Added the remove all terrains button.

Lennart

 

Biome package update?

 

ETA on the guide?

 

Quick question with regards to updating shaders to use the indirect instancing. Is the VS_indirect file here still valid? I might be blind, but I can't find it in the VS Pro hierarchy. There's a speedtree_indirect.cginc file, but that's all I can see.

 

Just use the file from github.
On my phone. Send me a message if you have any problems.

Lennart

 

Is there any specific way to tell that the shader is now using the indirect instancing? The shader compiled at the very least.

Changing the render mode of the tree using the shader to Instanced Indirect did jump up the FPS, so I'm guessing that means it's working?

 

Yes. If you in playmode has the render mode set to instanced indirect and you can see the object it works.
In editor mode everything is rendered instanced, indirect only in playmode.

Lennart

 

Utility components.

Hi. Finished porting the BackgroundMaskCreator component. It will be in the update I submit on monday.
It has UI to easy snap to individual terrains or the entire world area.

 

Yesterday got a bit busy. I will try to finish tomorrow.

Lennart

 

Looks really good!! I am hoping to try it soon!!

Just in case I do not get it right away (busy, work, etc) what will be the price at the end of the launch price ($150-$175)?

Thank you,
Xalo

 

149 USD.

Lennart

 

Thank you!! I appreciate it!!

 

Is there documentation on how this works (for VS, since it's not released for VSP yet)?

Specifically, I'm wondering if I can use this in a terrain tile grid setup that has both Unity terrains and mesh terrains, rather than baking all the trees to persistent storage? (So the trees spawn on both Unity and mesh terrains.)

 

Hi.

Here is a link to the documentation for the standard Vegetation Studio version.

Not sure what you are trying to do but this is a small utility component that helps you create a ortho texture of a terrain. This you can use in photoshop as a backgroun while manually painting mask textures. It makes it easier since you have the ortho texture to paint on.

Lennart

 

Hi,

In my IL2CPP build I do not get any vegetation rendering. I am using 2018.3.0b9 on Windows 10 Pro with IL2CPP set to Release configuration and code stripping set to low. The output log says that "ExecutionEngineException: Attempting to call method 'Unity.Jobs.IJobParallelForExtensions+ParallelForJobStruct`1[[AwesomeTechnologies.VegetationSystem.InstanceSteepnessRuleJob, AwesomeTechnologies.VegetationStudioPro.Runtime, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null]]::Initialize' for which no ahead of time (AOT) code was generated."

​

Thank you.

 

Run-time loaded terrains.

Hi. I just made a small guide for setting up run-time loaded terrains with Vegetation Studio Pro. You can find it here.

Lennart

 

Oh, I misunderstood. So then my question is: Is there a way to use a control map for tree spawning -- i.e., spawn trees in all white pixels of the control map? And if so, will that work on both Unity and mesh terrains for runtime spawning? (So this would be used instead of other rules like slope and terrain textures.)