[RELEASED] Vegetation Studio

Hi. Lanrosta.

If you want to remove vegetation run-time you can create a vegetation mask that will filter this out. From before there is a VegetationMaskArea and a VegetationMaskLine Component.
I am now adding the VegetationMaskCircle Component. Add one of these to any location. Set parameters for what you want to remove and it will handle the rest.

Right now it removes vegetation per category. Grass, Plant, Tree, Object and Large Object but adding a system for adding spesific VegetationItems is not hard to do.

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. GameObject vegetationItemMaskObject = new GameObject();
3. vegetationItemMaskObject.transform.position = vegetationItemInstanceInfo.Position;
4. VegetationMaskCircle vegetationMaskCircle = vegetationItemMaskObject.AddComponent<VegetationMaskCircle>();
5. vegetationMaskCircle.Radius = 5f;
6. vegetationMaskCircle.RemoveGrass = true;
7. vegetationMaskCircle.RemovePlants = true;
8. vegetationMaskCircle.UpdateVegetationMask();
9.  

This will register a mask in the vegetation system that removes grass and plants within a 5 meter radius of the GameObject it is added to.
This is the easiest way to do it since the component handles everything for you. If you destroy the gameobject vegetation comes back. You can move it, change it etc.

If you want to do handle a bit more yourself you can skip the component and add the internal mask yourself.

Code (csharp):

1.  
2.  CircleMaskArea maskArea = new CircleMaskArea
3.  {
4.     Radius = 5f,
5.     Position = YourPosition,
6.     RemoveGrass = true,
7.     RemovePlants = true
8.  };
9.  maskArea.Init();
10.  VegetationStudioManager.AddVegetationMask(maskArea);    
11.  

This will register a mask directly with the mask system. You need to keep the reference and remove it when you need to.

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. VegetationStudioManager.RemoveVegetationMask(maskArea);
3.  

Doing this is fast. The mask system will handle all refresh needed automatic when adding and removing.
The internal CircleMaskArea class is working now. The component I will finish soon.

I will explain a bit how the same effect could be done with the Persistent Storage API tomorrow.

Lennart

 

Hello I have a few questions:
1. When will be release? it is important for us because we really would to use this tool in our game but it is time based decision
2. I saw there is paint tool there too, it is the most important part of placing grass. but is there option to change grass prefab for example we have 2 scenes I would to paint some grass on level then duplicate that level and in the second one I would to change normal grass to burned grass but in the same place, Is this possible?
3. Will there be a compatibility with Gena or isnt that neccesesary with your system?
4.We would to use some Hero level speed tree (15-20k per tree) on our firt person view game, How do you think with your system how many these type of trees we could render?
5. How to test beta?
6.How wind works with plants without speed tree I mean normal mesh grass?
7.What about paint tool, because what could be strange but we have onyl 500mx500m terrain so painting tool is most neccesary tool for me becasue we are using only 8 terrain textures but have a lot of plants, and adding plants by texture is not enough for us, As I understand I could just paint on terrain like it was on unity terrain? THe best thing for us in your asset is optimization, that we need, and we probably use only piant tool so this is neccessary info for us. Thanks

 

Hi

1. I am trying to send this to asset store next week. Working on documentation and video tutorials now. Seems like Unity uses 3 weeks for approval now.

2. Yes. this is not a problem. You can do this in code to switch the prefab/texture or just duplicate the VegetationPackage and switch between them. Some more advanced scripting is also possible using vegetation masks.

3. You can spawn any object with GeNa to the scene/terrain as normal. If you add houses and larger objects you can pre configure them with vegetationMaskAreas that will auto adjust the vegetation. See the VegetationMaskArea doc on the website for more info. I am also talking with Adam about a deeper integration but we do not know how that will end out yet.

4. It all depends on the computer/GPU and your density. Vegetation Studio replaces unity terrains internal culling and rendering using the new Instanced and Instanced Indirect API. This is faster as you have less state changes on the GPU but you still need to render all this. It is using the same meshes, materials etc.

5. Send me a PM

6. There is a built in grass system that allows you to build grass meshes and render this. This has wind and wind wave support, and also touch bend.

you can use your own grass shader with this as long as it supports instancing. there is a _Wind vector injected to all materials rendered using a MaterialPropertyBlock but the shader needs to handle the vertex movement itself.

I also have an include file and instructions for how to support instanced indirect for 3rd party vegetation shaders with Vegetation Studio.

 

Lennart, you can make a big stage with unlimited hills and other objects with a zone of visibility, with a dense cover of grass and a large (10 or more thousand) number of trees. and compare its performance with standard Unity tools, and with Vegetation Studio. Thank you.

 

Hi. I will try to do a performance video, explain a bit and do some tests. But will not be this week. I am trying to have focus on finishing the documentation for the first release.

Lennart

 

Hi. Everyone.

I have a question. I am looking for some nice screenshots made with Vegetation Studio. I want some to use with the Asset promotion to show sample work done with Vegetation Studio.

Any of you beta testers have any I could use for that?

Lennart

 

Hi. A few days ago was released SPEEDTREE CINEMA 8. Unfortunately, not yet available for Unity, but, I hope soon. So the question is - do you have any information, maybe a little insider ;-) And do you have the opportunity to prepare for a new release?

 

Sorry, have no more info than you about that. When a new version shows up they still need to use the rendering system of unity with meshes and materials. I do not think it will be a problem to support it.

 

Random screens I've done while studying the vegetation studio
Very dense foliage and still have some place for other geometry. around 70fps with vegetation studio, 0.3-1 fps without.

 

Really nice shots .. what assets have you used for foliage ?

 

All foliage is speedtrees.

 

Looking good

 

Hey,

1) I want to ask you, if that asset will work nicely with terrain composer 2 ? I already have a terrain/trees/splat textures and grass, but I would like to use your asset when it's out and maybe change some of the tree models or other vegetation. The reason I want to use it is because of the performance benefits. I would still like to keep my splat textures that were drawn by NodePainter, so they should not be affected by your asset. So is that even possible to use it when I already have a base island setup or I have to start from scratch with your asset?

2) Where to find good vegetation models?

 

Hi.

1. Vegetation Studio works good with terrains created with TC2. If you do not want Vegetation Studio to do any changes to the splat textures make sure you create a Vegetation Package with "No textures".

Trees can be imported from an existing terrain to a persistent storage and will work good.
Direct grass import can not be done but there is a spawning rule that can use the detail mask in the terrain as a distribution density mask.

You can then assign this mask rule to grass Vegetation Items and adjust the rotation, density, size range and other rules until you are happy. This final result you can bake to a persistent storage if you want or use as a run-time spawing rule.

2. I have been using the grass texture packages from Turboscalpeur. they are really nice. For plants and trees assets like the Tropical Forest pack and Speedtree. But there is a lot of assets with nice vegetation and textures on asset store.

Lennart

 

Here's a video showing VS using the Tropical Forest Pack by @Baldinoboy. The scene also uses the following assets: Azure Sky Pro, CTS, PRISM, SE Screen Space Shadows, and HX Volumetric Lighting.

 

it does look very good but it lacks some Post FX to feel like a forest.
And no I couldn't do it much better, I just know something is missing

 

Hello what is your graphics card model please

 

Viking Island need a panoramic path

 

I pretty much threw this together in about an hour so if there are ways to improve it I'm not surprised. Especially since I'm not an artist. It does have various post FX such as bloom, filmic tone mapping, color correction lut, sharpen, fog, etc.

 

nVidia GeForce GTX 1070

 

I wish Vegetation Studio and Landscape Auto Material has an integration, that would be an ultimate parametric world creation and rendering solution.
Also, how should we add indirect instancing support to shaders? I managed to add standard instancing but not indirect.

EDIT: grain on screens is image compression artefact.

 

Here is an updated video. I changed the LUT and added depth of field and color enhance. I hope it looks more like a forest.

 

looks good, but 1070 I'm worried this and the like are very rare, I think no more than 10% ... there is someone 1050, 2-core processor and not more than 4 gb of memory, here is a typical set of about 50% of the market , what can be expected with this configuration?

 

It all depends. There are so many ways to configure this scene with every asset I've used. I have no doubt that making different decisions could make this run just as well on 1050. Lower texture resolution, eliminate highest LOD for trees, remove a couple of post effects or lower the quality a little.

 

sounds reassuring, thank you for sharing your experience. you can not test your scene on a weak computer? I think everyone would be useful.

 

I have a computer with just 640 GT card, but I think that's a little too far in the other direction, but I could try just for laughs. Although I'm sure I would need to drop some of the post FX to get a decent frame rate.

[

 

640 Gt is approximately equal to Intel HD Graphics 530 integrated graphics Skylake (Core-i7 6700), it would be interesting

 

OK, so I ran on my 640 GT with no changes whatsoever in 1152x864 fullscreen resolution (it doesn't have widescreen monitor). And I got from 18-20 fps. This actually surprises me because depth of field is usually a killer on that GPU. Some things to note:

1. The scene isn't even fully optimized as I only used VS for the main trees and not the rocks or small plants.
2. VS is undergoing an upgrade today that will make things even faster.
3. Post FX are pretty heavy in this scene and performance could be improved by just removing depth of field alone.

I'd say this test showed a lot. VS is indeed awesome.

[EDIT]
If you want, I can share the test scene privately somewhere and you can run on your own system. Note, I've been running in Good quality mode, which I honestly feel is good enough and going any higher doesn't really improve the look to be worth the drop in fps.

 

I will make a document describing the process tomorrow. I have a include file you can use and then it is only 3 lines of code in the shader. 2 pragmas and including the fille.

The include file has code that reads the buffers and sets up the rendering for Vegetation Studios implementation of Instanced Indirect.

 

You could probably use the terrain shader system from LAM with no problem, but the procedural generation and mesh combiner of LAM does not work well with an instanced based renderloop. There is no good way to feed those objects to VS and render it.

Lennart

 

this is really good news! Thank you. this gives hope that with such tools as VS we will really be able to realize our dreams in open worlds. it may be useful to include in the advertising VS scene on the integrated graphics of the latest generation, for marketing purposes ;-)

 

Thanks for clarifying! I thought that there is a way to get autotextures and pass them to VS include/exclude rules, but I realized that this is useless and easier way to set similar slope parameters in vs and lam... silly me, I need to dig in more.
Sorry for interrupting you.

 

I have not seen many images with so well done Post Effect setup !
Great work on the Color Grading ( i guess it is setup ).
With so much vegetation and good post effects it is sweet to watch it !
Awesome !

 

Testing the precision painting tool on geometry today. Works great!

 

Hello, Im having a small issue with tree distribution. My trees need to be tightly packed but I want them to not intersect as they're not regular tree models, the "leaves" are made of a solid material.

I couldnt find a way to make VS detect the collision of the tree and prevent spawning another tree if it intersects with another. Is there a way to do this currently? I've tried playing with the checkbox for Collision Detection but I've haven't had any results.

Since I have multiple different tree model I would need to be able to do this check on other vegetation items.

Thanks!

 

Hi.

The collision detection setting on each of the trees should reduce collision. What is does is create a 50cm resolution grid internally in each cell while spawning. All trees will test the grid and require the center point + the grids around available before spawning a tree. Spawned trees will then register with the grid to avoid hitting other trees.

This approach is fast but needs some improvements. It does not consider the size of the tree. Plan is to read this from the configured collider's and let the tree use check of the actual area in the test grid. It will also need to handle edge cases better.

I will try to explain this a bit better later with a plan on how it will be improved.

Lennart

 

Another update.

We are getting closer. I just released a release candidate to the beta test group. We test a few days to see if any new issues show up with the latest release and then I send 1.0 to asset store

Lennart

 

Hi~
How to paint on mesh ?
it seems only "Precision Painting" can do that, is it right ?

 

Precision panting can paint on any mesh and does not need colliders. It builds a octree of the scene meshes and handles raycasting manually.

The normal painter can paint on terrain and meshes with colliders. There is a setting to enable collider painting.

Enable paint on colliders here.



Lennart

 

Anyone else getting a whole bunch of errors on the release candidate? I did what i usually do in deleting awesometech folder then importing new package.

Assets/AwesomeTechnologies/VegetationStudio/VegetationSystem/VegetationSystem_FrustumCulling.cs(12,17): error CS0101: The namespace `AwesomeTechnologies' already contains a definition for `TextureMaskBand'

 

I did just deleted old package from the project assets and imported the RC1 - it was fine

 

Then you probably did not delete all old files. The VegetationSystem_FrustumCulling.cs file was renamed to VegetationSystem_ComputeShader.cs

Lennart

 

I have deleted folder again, shut down unity reopended and reimported. Strange how it failed the first three times but it is correct now. Thanks.

 

Have you tried changing the time of day

 

No, but I've since turned down the sun intensity for Azure sky. I wanted a daytime scene, but I might let it cycle day/night in the demo. Not sure yet.

 

If you have a 3D object that needs an icon. Magic Icon Creator is very easy and makes great icons.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/72218

So if you need a tree icon and you have a tree, or need a plant icon to signify foliage and you have a plant. it's painless and quick.

 

Development update.

We found a few small issues and warnings on release candidate 1. These are all fixed now and RC2 is out tomorrow. I think this is the version that goes to asset store for review.

Lennart

 

I am considering setting up a discord support chat for Vegetation Studio when it releases. In addition to the forum. Chats are easier sometimes.

What do you all think. Is it the right platform to use?

Lennart

 

Uhm, if you need only chat, there is a point to look at https://slack.com, it is a bit more support/busines oriented and does not require installing anything. And just as mention there are some similar abilities, in Twitch app (CurseApp), but discord seems to be the most popular and cheap solution.