[RELEASED] Vegetation Studio

here too

 

Mesh terrain on the list but it needs some testing.

Access to the Unity terrain is done using an interface in Vegetation Studio. Not 100% yet but I plan to move the rest of the direct Terrain access code to this class.

When this is done it will be possible to implement a meshterrain class that implements the same functions.
What needs some testing here is the approach to sample mesh for height and normal that is used during the sample process. There is a few options here.

1. Force the implementation single threaded and have the physics engine do ray casting to get sample positions.
   This is fast to implement but will not scale on multiple threads.
2. Sample the terrain mesh in the editor to build a heightmap to sample. This will use the same math as for the terrain and is fast but might not be 100% accurate if the mesh is not based on a grid and we can match up the sample points.
3. Implement a k-d tree that builds in the editor and let the threads sample this with a manual raycast to find the height and normal. It will be accurate but I need to test to see the speed. Maybe do a c++ dll that holds the tree and does the sample.

Most of the rules will work except for those using the unity terrain splatmap or detailmap as spawning rules.

Lennart

 

Working on adding vegetation using Vegetation Studio, Microsplat, and Enviro. Amazing results. Thanks!

 

We are in good hands! Keep up the great work guys

 

What are you using for the clouds?

 

For the video I used the new 2.0 version of Enviro.

Lennart

 

Man this asset is so good...why Unity has to be so slow with approving it !! ? ?!

I hope CTS will use the stuff from the tech You made (latest dev update). I am soooooo excited to use it. For now i am gonna finish my material in Unreal and immediately jump to Unity when this is released

 

@LennartJohansen Will there be a launch sale for Vegetation Studio?

 

Yes, the first few days there will be a launch sale at 75 USD.

Unity is taking some time but I am using the time good preparing the first update that I will submit as soon as Vegetation Studio hits the store.

Been 20 days now, could be any day now.

Lennart

 

They sure as hell do take their time!

 

So while we're waiting, I'm still loving VS Also, microsplat has a shoreline wetness thing that lets you make rocks and sand wet from waves washing up and over them, how cool is that?! (here it is with just 10cm above the waterline defined as "wet".)

 

This looks great!!! I am going to try that.

 

Any way for some of us to just buy it directly from you and then get a "gifted" copy to the store? I assume that's kind of what you're doing with the beta folks. I want to jump on this as soon as I can. By the same token, for those in the beta and whatnot, is there any chance of getting the updated build on a quicker turnaround than the asset store has it?

A variety of asset store developers, like the AStarPathfinding and Amplify folks, to name two, have ways to give your invoice order and then get access to in-between builds prior to stuff being on the asset store. I think ProCore might also do this, can't recall. With other asset store authors, like Hitbox and Livenda and Octamodius, I've been through test/fix cycles with them outside of the asset store, and gotten an update prior to it going onto the store thanks to helping bugtest, etc.

You can't please everyone all the time, I get that, but I'm ready to throw my money at you the moment there's a way to.

 

@mortengulden what is the average FPS of the last scene you shared? (With what graphic card )

 

Hehe it's horrible, like 30 fps in 1080p in editor (on a gtx 970). I freely admit I'm just testing an unrealistically high resolution (and very small) terrain and probably unnecessarily small grass patches and such, sorry! (but it's puurty!

 

LOL

My scene above his ran at over 100 fps. I feel it is a bit too much vegetation density in the grass so will probably thin that out. Vegetation Studios really shines when you use billboards and the optimizations for the scene, usually not a small up close one, but a landscape.

I use @turboscalpeur 's grasses, btw. I forgot to add him to my above picture. Great stuff!

 

Hehe yes very true! But I've doing some archviz lately and am looking into how much detail to put into stuff when doing stills and video. Still, optimizing a bit I can get it up to 40 now, and there's more to go on, so hopefully we can do this level of detail in VR on next gen cards.

 

Would love to try it out !

 

Hi.

When publishing on the asset store there is a limited number of vouchers you can distribute. Selling outside the asset store and giving vouchers is really not an option. Also asset store is doing their part of promotion, payment, providing customers and infrastructure, I want to keep the sales in one channel.

For updates this is different. I have the website structure ready for updates, and we have been using this during the beta.
Vegetation Studio customers will be able to register with the invoiceID and get direct downloads on release versions, patches and betas. The first week or 2 you would have to email the invoice to me and I upgrade the user but I am working on making this an automatic process.

This way I can distribute patches with no delay and new versions faster.

I also plan to distribute 2 versions of the asset on the website. Core and full version. Full version is the same as on the asset store but core is stripped from all demo assets and much smaller. Asset store requires me to distribute demos but when you are in production you probably do not need this anymore.
There is also a mailing list with updates and changelog as new versions are available.

Lennart

 

Hey, Just a quick question regarding the discount. Do you know how long it's going to last? I get paid again on the 30th of this month and wanted to use some of the cash to buy this awesome asset.

 

The discounted release price will be 1 week. Starting when asset store gets around to approve it.

Lennart

 

@LennartJohansen: All sounds great, in that case! Hopefully the asset store approves it quickly.

 

It looked like the second option you described was more suitable for direct conversions from Unity terrain to mesh. What about 3D sculpted terrains containing caves and overhangs? I hope whichever approach you decide on works with them as well. If so, as others have said, it's an instant buy for me.

 

Guys? Quick question, does unity usually take this long to approve awesome?

 

Sometimes. Taking into consideration the long holiday weekend here in the US, plus the prep for not only last week's Black Friday sale but also this week's Mega sale. It adds backlog to the review queue. Hopefully, Unity will get it on the asset store soon.

 

I read that others assets store developer have the same problem... a month for the admission.

 

Hi.

I talked to asset store yesterday, still in line for review they seem to have a lot to do now, but I do not think it will take that many days...

Lennart

 

Y, its frustrating . Its like a kid that can see a cookie through the store window, but can't buy it and eat it!

 

Just FYI, I will buy VS right away just to support your awesome work but do not count my sale as VS for terrain support ...

what I really want is the mesh support and terrafirma

 

Congratulations Lennart. This is the best vegetation solution for Unity by far, and it will definitely be a game changer!

 

More billboards

I have added a custom billboard atlas renderer for unity tree creator trees. Tree creator has some "strange" normals and I had recalculate to get the billboard atlas nice. Vegetation Studio will auto detect trees with custom atlas render shaders. No need to do anything when adding new tree prefabs.

If you have existing vegetation packages you need to press the "regenerate billboards" button on each tree.

Here is an example using trees from the Ultimate Nature Pack made by @BHS





Lennart

 

Take my money please! I can't wait to get VS.

 

Hi

I think we are getting closer to release. Some other assets that was submitted just a few days before Vegetation Studio has been approved... but you never know...

If you want to be notified when Vegetation Studio releases and not miss the firsts week release sale you can sign up for the newsletter on the Vegetation Studio website. Signup is direct on the front page.

https://www.awesometech.no/

Lennart

 

pressé qui sorte

 

Translation for all non French speaker : “I can’t wait that it get out”

 

Just one more quick question.
Tree interaction with Vegetation Studio is possible right? For instance if the player wanted to chop down a tree. That specific tree and it's colliders would disappear with the right code in place. I'm sure this is possible with the run time prefab spawner.

 

Yes, this is possible. There is a harvesting demo script in the demo scene that gives you an axe cursor and allows you to cut down one of the tree types. Have a look at that. You basically create a VegetationItemMask on a GameObject that you assign the VegetationItemInstanceInfo class to. This will remove the tree.

If you want it back just destroy the object with the VegetationItemMask.

There is also a low level API version of this if you want to manage this yourself without creating gameobjects.

If you have the trees baked to the PersistentVegetationStorage you can also add and remove trees runtime with the API.
To have this saved between sessions you need to serialize the changes yourself and apply them at load.

Lennart

 

Perfect thank you so much, this is for sure going to be one of my top 3 best assets I've ever purchased.

 

Vegetation Studio Chat

During the beta we had a text chat for the beta users on Skype. Since we are close to release I am opening up the chat to anyone. There is a lot of people there with Vegetation Studio experience and I will also be there to answer questions.

In addition to this I set up a discord channel for those that do not want to use Skype.

Here are the links to the Skype chat and Discord chat.

Edit:
I also posted the links on the 2nd post in the thread and will add to the asset description after release.

Lennart

 

Hi @LennartJohansen

Do you think we can approach something similar ? (from minute one of the video).

sorry for my english and thank you for your promising product !

 

If you assign vegetation and spawning rules to different terrain textures you can get the similar forest painting effect like this. The default approach is more starting out with a full procedural terrain and then tame the forest with masks and rules. Have a look at VegetationMasks here. this is for making roads, automatic vegetation removal for houses, gardens etc.

It all depends on how you want to work. Vegetation Studio is basically a rules toolkit you configure to work with your workflow.

Lennart

 

Seems like a lot of unnecessary work compared to Vegetation Studio.

 

Version numbering

I am finishing the first update to Vegetation Studio. I will submit the update when unity approves.
I wanted to explain how I will do version numbering.

First update will be 1.0.1.0 where we have A.B.C.D

A and B is major and minor version as normal. I will increase minor version with new features of importance.
C is increased on new version published to asset store.
D is for internal and patch builds that will be available for download direct from the www.awesometech.no website for registered users. This way you do not have to wait for the asset store in order to get the latest fixes and changes.

the first time after release you would have to send me the username on the web and the invoice ID to be added to the registered user group but this will be an automatic process on the website soon.

The ChangeLog is updated for all versions on the website and will also be sent on email to registered users when a new version is available.

Registered users also have a ticket system available on the website to report bugs and problems.

Lennart

 

I have the feeling it’s for tonight...

 

Component overview

Hi. I have just uploaded a video showing a overview of the main components of Vegetation Studio

Lennart

 

I think I agree with that statement ... VS is really productive and can adapt to how you'd like to work ... not force some hard coded tool methodology on you.

In most cases what I find what works well is let VS populate the large area - you don't wan to hand-paint a 2 x 2km terrain!
Then 'tweak' it till it starts looking how you want it.
Then start further refining on specific areas of interest, either by using masks etc and/or by hand placing exactly where you want and don't want foliage / objects.

And yes you can include things like dynamic masking so moving objects around will remove vegetation etc

 

We need this now

 

This certainly is how I use it, altho you also paint with those kinds of brushes when you need to place vegetation on geometry (rocks in my case, mainly).

 

I want to do a hedge grow maze. I was planing to either make custom meshes for the walls (painted black) then cover them with branches and leaves (using VStudio) or raising the terrain, painting the "walls" black and then covering them in the same manner. So I was wondering what you'd think would be best. I am a little worried the connection to the ground might be a little more obvious if I use the terrain to build the hedge walls, but if I use meshes then I'll probably have to paint all the vegetation manually using the painting options, right?

I was also thinking, if I can get better performance using Vegetation Studio for randomly placed objects, it might be a nice experiment to try to use it to build some parts of my level using the paint functions instead of traditional object placement. Anyone tried using it that way before? (I mean, instead of just for randomly generated objects). It might work good for objects that don't need to snap to other objects precisely.

 

If you do it with terrain you can use the normal spawning rules to place objects. Select rotation option to follow terrain to get orientation good.
for the mesh walls you would have to have a collider added to use the manual painting tools. Both approaches work, but probably less work with the terrain to set up the vegetation.

What kind of randomly places objects do you have?

Lennart