[Released] Vegetation Studio Pro

Thanks for the quick response! I haven't bought it yet. Will this asset by any chance be participating in any of the Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales? I'm aware that Vegetation Studio is, but just wondering if there is any chance we could be seeing the pro version as well

 

He is with Veg Studio...

 

I'm also wondering if the pro version will be a part of any sale this sale season? Thank you!

 

Not sure if I'm missing something here or just skimmed over it but if you could spoon feed me here I would appreciate it, is it possible to apply a biome to a channel on an RGBA texture mask? for instance, applying Biome1 to R I'd assume it is but if you could tell me where this option is located that would be awesome... (I can only seem to find the individual vegetation item texture mask option)

 

Hi All, so, both Map Magic and VS Pro have floating point solutions for large worlds. I'm assuming I should use one or the other. Does anybody have an opinion on which? The Map Magic solution apparently has some limitations. Are there any limitations with VS Pro?

 

I don't think so. Perhaps next year. The Black Friday sale already started on Unity side and VS Pro is already on low Release price.

They are completely different products. Map Magic is more an alternative to Terrain creating Products like GAIA or Terrain Composer. VS and VS Pro don't create any terrain. VS / VS Pro simply spawns Vegetation and Meshes on a Terrain which needs to be created before. So with Map Magic you can create Terrains and also spawn stuff on it but you will not have the features regarding performance, spawning rules and biomes which come with VS and VS Pro. When creating a Terrain you need a creation tool like Gaia, Terrain Composer, World Creator etc. And for spawning and / or texturing you would use VS / VS Pro.

Cheers
Ronny

 

Thanks for the reply. I understand the products but was more interested if anyone a
has experience or knowledge of the floating point solutions they both implement for shifting the world origin.

 

Hi. Vegetation Studio Pro supports floating origin but it does not control it for the scene. Use the floating origin support in MapMagic, Worldstreamer or any other solution. Then take the root transform of your "world" that is moved with the floating origin and assign that to Vegetation Stuido Pro. This anchor allows VS Pro to follow the shift and do the same with vegetation.

Vegetation Studio Pro has a discounted release price but is not a part of any sales now.

Lennart

 

Hi. Biomes defined from a texture is something I want to look at, but I did not get around to it yet. It will require a bit extra data in the mask to get all funcionality. Have a look at this post.

Lennart

 

Do you have a video tutorial on how to do biomes?

 

You can find some videos here, especially the "edit biome rules" and "edit biome area masks".
But I haven't found a video complete from the beginning for smaller things like creating the biome asset-file. So some infos from the first version of vegetation studio, or reading some written info could help you too.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBtkQhjDIKPt5agxQ2Z6R3A/videos

 

Yeah. I want to create my own biome using the the types that Nature Manufacture did in their latest example.It would be nice to have a beginning to end on how to do so.

 

Hello, @LennartJohansen

I'm trying to access the VegetationStudioCamera script so I can change the CameraCullingMode from Frustrum to 360 in runtime. However, I can not figure out how to reference the script in my code.

Is this currently possible?

Thank you,
Nathan

 

Thanks for the fast response! @LennartJohansen I very much hope biomes will eventually be applied by splats, that would be great.
loving the work so far though!

 

Hi Lennart,

I just tested another build configuration and found that I get the same error with burst compilation disabled in an IL2CPP build.

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.
​

I went through the build files and verified that the burst compiler was not being used.

This was an IL2CPP development build for Windows x64 with stripping level on Low, C++ Configuration on Release, and burst compilation disabled using Unity 2018.30b11.

If I am correct, this would mean that the IL2CPP compiler in Unity is not generating Ahead of Time code for this job even without the use of burst. I am not sure if I should file a bug report with Unity (I am using the beta) or if there is something specific (such as the burst compiler attribute above it) about this code that causes it to be skipped in Unity's IL2CPP compilation.

Thank you.

 

can you make it compatible with 2017.4 LTS? because LTS thing make me stick with 2017...will move to 2018 if already on LTS too

 

I asked the same and no it's not possible. Burst job system only comes with 2018 release. Thats why 2017 (LTS) will not be supported.
I am also on the 2017 LTS release and waiting for 2018 LTS release to being able to use VS Pro. Which will come January as I understood...

Cheers
Ronny

 

A bug report could be good. This seems to be a knows issue but then we have some bug ID to follow.

Hi. It will not be possible to support older Unity versions than 2018.2 Unity does not update the burst and job packages for older versions.

No videos on biome creation but I will make a more detailed guide soon.

Lennart

 

I planed to create some vids using VS Pro (with Speedtrees and NatureManufactor Assets), CTS, and Gaia. But this will happen next year when LTS Release 2018 is released so I can use VS Pro

 

Hi, is there a way to pre-load the vegetation at startup? I have a top down game and experience a lot of lag when moving around and viewing the vegetation in the game for the first time.

 

Baking vegetation to the persistent storage will speed up spawning. Then the instance lists are ready to be used. Reducing billboard cell size could also help. I am planning a preload distance for billboards.

Lennart

 

Hi Lennart, thanks, that did the trick

 

Well....something that would reduce the texture filesize. I'm no texture format expert -- why won't DXT format work?

 

It needs to be uncompressed data. With the new interface on Texture2D I can get a NativeArray direct to the memory and calculate positions to look up data. With compressed data entire chunks will have to be decompressed on the CPU and then sampled. This is done in hardware when used on the GPU.

Lennart

 

Can you list the assets that work best with Veg Pro representing different biome types?

 

Hi @LennartJohansen

I’m still stuck on this. Is this cuurently possible?

Thanks,
Nathan

 

Sorry, missed the question.

get a reference to the VegetationSystemPro component.

loop the VegetationStudioCameraList to find your camera.
You can test the SelectedCamera public variable to find the correct.
then set the CameraCullingMode on the camera to CameraCullingMode.Complete360

Lennart

 

Is the HDRP support/node thing available, or shall I wait a bit longer?

 

Hi. The node is here on github. MIT license if someone needs to include it with something.
It should get instanced indirect working on HD SRP 4.2 but it will break on 5.1 in 2019.1 alpha 10. Unity is releasing a new API for nodes and set some classes intenal breaking old custom nodes.

When the new API is released. I will try to make a custom node and port the billboard shader.
But if you want to play without billboards and the included grass shader give the node a try.

Lennart

 

Which Vegetation assets does VS Pro work with?

 

I started to make a list here but it is not complete in any way. Most shaders that support instancing should work.
If anyone see an asset that should be here, let me know.

Lennart

 

Thanks will do!

 

You can use mesh terrain, that is any mesh with mesh renderer.

Now this mesh will not have any overhead of Unity Terrain, or any properties of Unity Terrain. Is this correct?

Also, it uses GPu Instancing, etc so does that mean bending will take place for hundreds of plants without heacy CPU usage?

 

I've been asked a few times now about the car driving scene. I thought if you guys have fun with Vegetation Studio Pro and the Biomes Environment, you shouldn't drive around with the grey car of the Unity Standard Assets. I published the textures which I created for the car to github and made instructions about how to apply them.

Github link:

https://github.com/Roland09/CarPaint

This is how it will look like:


Have fun!

 

Hi.

The mesh terrains are still rendered as normal. When you add them to a MeshTerrain component and generates the BVH tree it makes the internal structure Vegetation Studio Pro needs to sample height and normal on the terrain when spawning vegetation.

Lennart

 

I thought I'd try something new

 

The upgrade price from standard Vegetation Studio to Pro is the price difference between the two assets. Currently 54 USD. This will increase to 74 USD after the Cyber week sale when the launch price of Pro is over and it goes to its normal price of 149 USD.

If you are logged in to the account you bought Vegetation Studio with you should get the upgrade price up as a "Sale" price on Pro.

Lennart

 

Hi, @LennartJohansen - been playing with the asset for a while and I'm really impressed. I've come to the point where I need to use in a large scale world and am wondering if it's possible to feed in a mask based on a satellite image for the generation of the vegetation. If I had to do this manually by painting/creating masks for each biome it would quickly become tedious, because of the size of my game world. Thank you

 

There is a texture mask system where you can use textures as spawn rules. Currently the only mask type is a RGBA mask where each channel can be uses as an include/exclude rule.

How is your satellite data? Some satellites like Landsat7 have an infrared band that is nice to get forest coverage from.

Lennart

 

Hi Lennart: After watching your biome demo on YouTube, what assets did you use to create those different biomes?

 

It was mostly the nature assets from NatureManufacture and speedtrees for the oasis/desert. CTS for terrain shader

Lennart

 

Is there a guide that you have in which you spell out how to make biomes? I have most of the NatureManufacture assets that Veg Studio compatible .

 

I will add some more guides later, now I focus on some needed changes/fixes and the export format to get persistent data from standard Vegetation Studio projects.

Lennart

 

Hello, how did you make the multierrains? How to cut / Stitch them like you did???

 

I got it from a Vegetation Studio user that I think made them with WorldCreator or some other tool.

Lennart

 

Awesome thanks, I'll give it a go My satellite imagery for now is pretty simple (Using Terraland 3), but thanks for the tip about the infrared band.

 

If you want to toy around with that, I recently put some quickly created 4K terrains on github:

https://github.com/Roland09/Terrain-Examples

They were created with World Creator 2. You can import them easily by using the free Sync-Tool from

https://www.world-creator.com/

If you want to split the 4K terrain into multiple 1K terrains, just set the split threshold accordingly:



There's nothing else to do

 

Well does it not make sense to work the other way around when creating multi tile terrains?
Instead of creating a terrain of XXkm and split it into X parts you normally create one terrain first - lets say 4km-4km - and after finishing it you stitch another terrain with the same size to it. Thats how I would create big terrains using multi terrain feature because a multi tile terrain will certanly grow with the time I am working on it. I can't imagine that you know exactly the size of terrain you need at the beginning (lets say 20kmx20km) for tiling it in X different parts, specially when talking about "open world" games. What happens if I see 10kmx10m were enouph or 40kmx40km would fit better etc.
I suppose thats also why Devision4 asked.
I did not work with multi tiled terrains right now, so this is just my idea.

Cheers
Ronny

 

Depends on your workflow. I'd rather say you should know in advance what you want to do and how big your open world terrain will be before you start your game. Prototyping should help. But things change, that's a valid point. Either way, it's super easy in World Creator 2 to enlarge the existing terrain and add more to it and then re-import it in Unity and re-apply the Vegetation Studio Pro settings. Also with a different tile size, then duplicate Biomes, move them around and so on. I did that recently, worked perfectly fine. Once that's done, you get a rough overview of your map and can start planning the details. That's my workflow, others may differ of course. Also I don't intend to create a game, I'm only having fun prototyping

 

One last question, so grass will work on mesh terrain including its bending in Vegetation Studio Pro