[RELEASED] Vegetation Studio

We disable VS collider system all together and use our own, for our game. So yes you can, I was in the beta.. Some cons with VS and this is all my opinion, is not really a fan of the over look of the grass shader. It performs a bit better than InfiniGrass 1, Unature... InfiniGrass 2, they aren't far off. when it comes to performance.. Also Bart has a Grass Shader that works with VS that looks much better. and works well with VS.

Other con, is the UX could be more streamlined, user friendly, so that, hundreds of pages of docs aren't needed. as much. But he seems to be always improving this...so it won't matter much.. in his defense, this is pretty common with tools that have this many features with Unity asset store. We been redoing most of it for our work flow and its been really easy to follow his clean code so hasn't been an issue..

The over all tool is done well, and it boils down to what kind of game you making and what platform you are using it for..Mobile I was unable to, for older devices and some newer low end devices...So if your a mobile developer, you will have to think about what devices you are supporting...

PC games, it works just fine and works great performs well.

Also I wish we seen more CTS, RTP , Mega Splat support, not just Micro splats..... but its not the end of the world..


One main thing I like is how you can set profiles for different seasons.. and change rather fast and its very clean when doing so... No one else has anything like this.
Bottom line, I suggest to buy it and compare with other tools and for your set up... That is what we been doing for months...in a Real game......Not everyone uses any assets in real games, it boils down to trying it for your self in your own set up.. .... The developer is super helpful as well....

 

I took a look at Bart's Advanced Foliage Pack 1 and just purchased it. Thanks for the tip.

 

I took a look at his video where he's using it in addition to vegetation studio:

Was an insta-buy.

 

On sale still so get it quick. It's a steal.

 

Oh sweet! I already had bought this, and was planning on using the textures and meshes, but now I'm going to install that sooner than later for the shaders.

 

Also use Turbo's Fern, grass textures as well, we use many of them in our game . I suggest to buy all of his stuff as well, they are very cheap...and well worth much more...

 

Seconded.

 

Sorry I was out all day yesterday.

Thanks for your responses Lennart and thanks for making this asset, even though I have problems I know it’s just my knowledge and understanding and it’s a fantastic asset..

During the beta process you have a small number of people who become very familiar with the asset and the level of conversation is at that higher knowledgable level.
Then you release the asset, all the beta testers cheer and sing it’s praises.
Many newcommers are too embarressed amidst this jubilation to ask a stupid question.
I on the other hand am the Stupid Question Master .

I don’t Understand

I wrote my first commercial program in 1978 and have been getting paid handsomely for programming ever since, if I don’t understand something, a lot of others don’t either.

so…

My plan is to use Microsplat to manage my terrain textures, I want VS to place the ground textures on the terrain based on rules, I believe this is possible judging by your features video showing a heat map.

I’ve gone through the documentation added some plants dragging and dropping them in VS run around in the grass etc. Didn’t need to use the manual it was self evident.

My ground textures are managed in the Project view in Microsplat / MicroSplatConfig I have my textures in there now.

How do I get those ground textures defined in Microsplat to appear in the VS Terrain system like they are in this picture?
http://www.mogstat.com/temp_images/Image-123-1.png

Step by step how do I do it?

Cheers
Roy

 

I really like your question, Roy -- and I look forward to a direct answer to it.

That said, purely as an aside, why do you want to use VS to handle the placement of the splats instead of something else like World Builder or Gaia or similar? No backhandedness intended in that question at all. I'm planning out my own workflow, but haven't had as much time to dig into World Builder, VS, or Microsplat yet as I'd like. I used to use Gaia and a few other similar things fairly extensively, though, and these seemed like clear upgrades.

For me I mostly want to create my terrain using one set of logic, and have it logically textured based on that... and then have my grasses and trees be another pass on top of that, and unrelated to the textures below unless it's something like a river or pond or whatnot (I hope to get R.A.M. working in there, too).

The reason I ask the above is I'm wondering if you've run into something else I don't know of yet with the approach I'm planning that makes VS controlling the splats a preferred approach. This is entirely tangential to your actual question, because it would be good to know how to do it via VS, regardless. I think all your points are valid.

 

Hey, I get it. I am one of those people who does not always understand. I am sure even though I did beta test that there are higher level stuff within VS that I still do not know.

I really want to make a video or something at a level someone like me, a designer/artist can understand, but bad timing with everything going on during the holidays and house guests. If you have specific questions, feel free to PM me. You do not have to feel stupid to ask me stuff because trust me, I have asked every stupid question out there. That is the way we learn.

If I do not know the answer, I can discover it with you. Even with just using the basics, the results are excellent and worth the effort.

 

I just drop them in the texture section of VS. However, I use something else to procedurally add the textures. But I find if I want to use the exclude/include they must be in the VS texture list. I make them inactive because I do not want them to change my splat map. Then I can easily go to Microplat's material and play with the texture settings.

So after you start VS by opening it in the hierarchy, you then go to the textures tab and add the textures. If you are using VS to procedurally place the textures, then use the height/slope/curves to do so. Microsplat should read them after they are on the splat map. It works very well. Since many of us tested with Microplat, the integration is seamless.

 

Hi Roy, I was in the beta, people shouldn't feel stupid, we all don't know a lot.. of things that some of the newer people may know. or someone in the chat...When they talk shaders,sometimes, I'm like WTF are they talking about...So I tend to learn, things I don't know by reading, listening to the Shader experts. I have written my fair share but there is plenty I don't have a clue....Since its not something I have time for.. . So I look at it, this way no question is stupid.... even if that person feels it may be....Just fire away... Someone typically will answer it.. in most chats I been in, or beta's...

 

Ok, I just wanted to freak out a little bit and say that I just created grass cards using some @turboscalpeur grasses and I didn't have to go in to Maya LT to do this.

I love this asset, lots to learn, probably won't sleep for a while!

 

It's finally working!
I copy/pasted the VS files one by one from another project, and no crash this time!

This asset is the best purchase I've made lately.
I was able to make a decent looking forest in minutes.

A question though:
I'm using ForestVision's trees, and even this number slows down my rather good computer.
What would you advise me to use for good looking yet performance-friendly trees? SpeedTree?

 

I am thinking about purchasing Vegetation Studio, but I have a question. Can you interact with trees via scripts on the trees, or are they like Unity's system where you can't put scripts on trees?

 

Oh, and also, does Vegetation Studio work with CTS (Complete Terrain Shader)?

 

Thanks for the answers peeps,

We are on a very similar wave length you and I x4000, bit off topic but VS forum is as good as any to start.

I’m splitting assets into categories so far I have 3: Tool Assets, Asset Assets, and Base Assets.

“Base Assets” are assets that are probably going to be in everyone of my projects: Script Inspector3(god send), Advanced FPS counter and probably Lighting Box 2.

“Asset Assets” are your typical assets like 3D models, Textures, Audio files they’re self contained and you bring them in to your project when required. I buy them open them up in their own project, Harvest off the bits I want into my ever growing library of stuff.

“Tool Assets” are assets that are used to create other assets and may not need to be in the project I’m working on.
Pro Builder Pro is a typical Tool Asset. I think it’s the best asset on the store as far as ongoing development support and usefulness goes. But I don’t want it in my Game project I don’t want to be moving the toolbar around or having stuff snap to pro grids when when I’m doing AI or working on terrain.

I’ve been using Gaia for my terrains and am very familiar with it but now with the introduction of Vegetation Studio I see Gaia has a “Tool Asset”

I plan to use Gaia in it’s own Terrain Creation Project probably with a road builder asset and Errosion Brush to make Terrain meshes that I export out as RAW files ready to be imported into “Game Projects”
More like a Terrain prototyping project where I can stick a weather system and some water in there run around get the feel of the terrain before exporting the mesh.

I’m hoping VS is my brand new Terrain “Base Asset” I feed it a terrain mesh and a bunch of rules and it does it’s awesome magic at run time.

That’s the plan anyways.

 

Since the trees does not exist in the scene as GameObjects you can not add scripts to them directly but there is a system designed to handle this. There is a component called RuntimePrefabSpawner that you can add to the same GameObject as the VegetationStudio component. This will allow you to add a prefab with the scripts you need and this will be instantiated run-time for the trees close to the camera. This object will also get a VegetationInstanceInfo component with the info you need to interact with the tree. Remove it etc.

Have a look here for doc on the run-time prefab spawner.

Another option could be to enable a collider for the trees. You can then subscribe to the OnCreateCollider event where you get a reference to the collider created and here you can add the scripts you want.

Se here for more info.

Yes, Vegetation Studio works with CTS, you can use any terrain shader.

 

Hi. Great you got it to work.

I have not uses the Forest Vision trees but bought a copy and I will try to look at it.

I use Speedtrees for demo projects, but there are a lot of other good tree packages on the asset store. Most of these have shaders that support instancing and should work. If you do find some with problems send me a message and I can look at it.

Lennart

 

I agree on this. Asking questions is a good way to learn. It also helps me understand what areas would need better documentation or GUI changes.

 

Hi Roy. As I said in the last post, keep asking questions. It is a good way to learn. I get to know where videos and documentation should be better. It could also help other users to get ideas of how to do something.

Assets like Vegetation Studio are big and designed to be general. Every user has its own workflow and there is many solutions to the same problem. This is one of there reason a lot of the functionality is split in different components. You can remove the parts you do not need. It is easier to extend and making variants of the component.

I will try to explain the step by step process for setting up the TerrainSystem component for your use case.

1. Create your terrain manually or with any terrain asset.

2. Add Vegetation Studio to the scene using the menu item under "Window/Awesome Technologies"

3. Create a vegetation package and save it in your project. Right click in the project folder and select "Create/AwesomeTechnologies/Vegetation Package.
Here you should select the number of textures you want to use with the terrain. I will assume 8 for this example but select what you want. You should save this outside of the AwesomeTechnologies folder to make sure it is not deleted if you remove and upgrade Vegetation Studio later

4. Make sure the correct terrain is assigned to the VegetationSystem component. With only 1 terrain in the scene this could be done automatic. Then assign the Vegetation Package you created to the VegetationSystem component.
It will be set up with 8 default textures that are now assigned automatic to the terrain.

5. Go to the TerrainTexture tab on the VegetationSystem component. Here you will see the textures in the Vegetation Package.


6. Drag and drop in the new textures you want to use. Vegetation Studio will update the terrain automatic.

7. Add the Microsplat terrain component to the Terrain and click the setup button. This will import the terrain textures to the microsplat texture array. You can now start configuring microsplat. Adding other textures than the diffuse and Normals unity terrain supports.

8. Go to the TerrainSystem component. Now you can start setting up the splat map rules, height, steepness, noise etc to generate the splat map on the terrain. By default the first 4 textures has example rules. You can test this with the generate terrain splat map button

Check the use with auto splat generation on the textures you want to use while generating. You probably do not want this on road textures etc. or any other you want to paint manually.

Anything painted manually with the textures that has "auto splat generation" turn off will be kept in the terrain when you generate the splat. This way you can paint a manual path and later do some fine adjustments to the splat map rules. The path will not be touched.

If you want to clear all layers when generating use the generate terrain splat map, clear all button.

I hope this helps a bit. Keep on asking.

Lennart

 

The components like the VegetationColorMaskCreator outputs a color mask that can be used to blend in grass in the distance. The output of this is not Microsplat spesific, but it needs to be implemented on the Terrain shader in order to work. So far only Jason has implemented functionality for this in Microsplat. Any terrain shader could do something similar but it is out of my control to do this. The shader developer will have to write code to use it.

As I said before on the forum if any other systems want a deeper integration i am more than happy to help out. All the settings needed like vegetation distance for when to fade in the grass mask is set as global shader variables and can be read by any shader.

Lennart

 

Thank you! I believe I will be purchasing Vegetation Studio sometime soon. It sounds great!

 

[SOLVED]

OK now I know what the problem was :
It works different to how I thought, my problem was with the set up order:
I was creating the terrain adding the textures doing micro splat then VS was overwriting them on the terrain but not the microsplat array.

The vital missing piece of information was :
You must start with the Default VS textures and overwrite them.

Right okay thankyou It’s sinking in slowly …

Cheers

Roy

 

I tried to help by telling you the steps. LOL I guess you missed it.

 

Sorry Teila its seems I'm blind aswell as thick..Lol

 

Yup well aware. was just an opinion and statement, as I said not end of the world.

 

Hey @LennartJohansen

Vegetation Studio looks great! Purchased it for use in VR and the performance is incredible.

I'm investigating lighting the grass with light probes, but it seems like the grass does not respect light probe information. Is there something I'm missing, or is this an unsupported feature? Below are some screenshots of some different lighting scenarios and the results.

Also, is it possible to use grass on meshes? I'm having a little difficulty getting the grass set up in a scene (on terrain/on a mesh) despite having looked through documentation, the demo scene, and the videos that are posted.

 

What assets are you using? I'm sure I'm doing something terribly wrong because I don't know what I'm doing, but I tried adding just 4 grass prefabs as vegetation items and the density isn't nearly as lush and I'm getting about 10fps. This is on a GTX 1080. I must be doing something wrong, but I don't know what. I may go through the Getting Started stuff again

 

Hi. Can you send me a PM, with some info on your scene setup. I can try to help you set up. What assets are you using it with?

Lennart

 

1. Unitys Instanced rendering does not support this yet, but according to the roadmap, GPU instancing will support GI from the 2018.1 Beta that is out in a couple of weeks. Have a look here.

2. You can have manually painted grass on meshes. Support for mesh terrain is something I will look at but I there is a some other features planned before this.

To paint on meshes you need to create a persistent vegetation storage package and assign it to the PersistentVegetationStorage component. Then go to the Painting tab there, make sure the paint on collider option is enabled and start painting.

Lennart

 

Sent you a PM. As I've said, I'm sure I'm doing something wrong.

 

Quick followup: I changed all 5 vegetations to Instanced Indirect (from Instanced) and I'm still getting a few lag spikes, but framerate jumped up a good 30fps.

 

Hello, I'm trying to integrated VegetationStudio with MapMagic. I followed the tutorial here:
https://www.awesometech.no/index.php/set-up-with-map-magic-infinite-terrain/

Unfortunately, despite several hours of research, VegetationSystem does not copy itself as a clone on my new land. An idea ?

 

Do you get any error message? This should work, the MapMagic component is basically just listening to the event when MapMagic creates a new terrain. Instantiates a copy if the VegetationSystem component you selected. Then assigns the new terrain.

I will test with the latest version of MapMagic tomorrow morning. (05:00 here now) and see if something changed.

Lennart

 

Finaly it's worked but only when playing mod. If i "pin" new terrain, the copy is not made.

And i see another problem.. When i'm in playing mod, the copy worked but create 6 clone of VegetationSystem on each ground

PS: are you french ?

 

I am from Norway.

Lennart

 

Well, Nobody’s perfect

Just kidding

 

Is there a way to use splat maps exported from Gaia?

I’m finding it difficult to set the ground texture splat maps how I want with the curve tool, I’ve got rock tiling through my grass and quite a lot of overlap.

I know Gaia has utilities to export all sorts of splat maps.

Cheers

Roy

 

Hi.

Having Vegetion Studio create your splat maps is optional. There is no problem using with with any terrain tool that creates maps. Create a VegetationPackage that has 0 textures and just disable or remove the TerrainSystem component. You can still use the splat maps for spawning rules but like this VS will not do any splatmap changes.

I will make a small guide on how to set up a Gaia terrain in VS. I will post it here when done.

Lennart

 

Did someone tried SE Screen Space shadow with VS? I really like how the grass looks...

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/77836

 

Gorgeous.

Performance are still good?

 

Yep, everything is fine.
i5 4590, gtx970

 

Thanks Lennart, I don't want Gaia in my "Game Project"
I'm going to use it in its own project rather like an external package that simply create terrains and splat maps then export them ready to be imported into my game projects.

Otherwise my game projects get cluttered up with Tool Assets and bits of Demo's.

Roy

 

Not a problem more of an observation...

I've got a simple Day night cycle basically a revolving directional light and I typically test the performance by setting my day lendth to 60 seconds and letting it run for a full cycle.

This tests all the lighting and shadow stuff ..

Vegetation Studio does not like this method of testing my frame rate drops to 78 fps from 188 fps

It's not a problem when the day night is running at a sensible rate it's fine
But VS must be calcualating something many times based on the changing light

Just an observation. Just incase anyone else encounters it

 

Looks good. Since sceeen space shadows is a full screen effect using the depth buffer the scene complexity does not matter. It is a great solution for grass and plat shadows.

 

Perfect for my Open-World Zombie game.

 

$75 is too expensive... will buy when price drop to $45 max.

 

Personally, I think it’s really cheap considering how the asset perform. It’s really a game changer for unity in term of landscape.

But after I can understand if you are tight budget wise.