[RELEASED] Vegetation Studio

Is there any antialiasing support in VS?

I saw a thread in this forum on aliasing for VR in the special case of screen space shadows, but any suggestions for flat screen antialiasing in VS? At 1080p pixel crawling is strong, especially in high contrast regions such as distant trees against the sky.

 

For now I'll proceed with baking all vegetation, but for the future it would be very helpful to permit VS+WS integration without needing to do that.

 

Hi. The persistent storage is per terrain. Vegetation packages can be shared between terrain.

The storage is optimized for loading and holds the same cell structure as the terrain internally. It is stored relative to terrain positition in order to support floating origin scenes.

What I think happens is that worldstreamer adds the VegetationMask to one of the scenes even if it covers multiple. This way it is not loaded for one of the terrain.

I will send you a pm with some things we can try.

Edit: Another option could be that the VegetationStudioManager object ended up in one of the scenes? This manages all the VegetationMasks in the scene.

Lennart

 

Hi, you can use any antialiasing solution with VS.

Lennart

 

@LennartJohansen

It seems a lot of us are working on multi-terrain setup and terrain-streaming mechanisms, it would be great to include the specialties in the documentation (maybe even example for the pooling - just to encourage this great adventure).

 

Good point, I will try make some guides.

Lennart

 

Does anyone have any suggestions for aliasing tools that help with VS models?

I'm using Beautify's DOF controls to blur the horizon tree line a bit, but the pixel crawling without aliasing is still quite problematic.

 

I use the temporal AA in the free Unity Post Processing Stack. You can find it here.

Lennart

 

Question about Bushes

I’m trying to make an English hedgerow but there aren’t a lot of Bush assets around.
I have some old bushes that I Believe they were made using the Unity tree creator thing
here is a picture:


I want to use them with Vegetation Studio and have them react to light correctly like PBR.
How do I go about updating / converting them?

What would your advice be?

Roy

 

Thanks, I was aware of the Unity Post-Processing stack but it really helps to know you've had good experience with it.

After a bit of testing I found that the temporal AA you suggested works nicely, with two important caveats:

• Set ‘Jitter:spread’ to min (0.1) to prevent large surfaces with multiple shaders from strobing
• Turn off the inbuilt Unity geometry AA: e.g., :Edit: Project Settings:Quality:Anti-aliasing OFF

 

Hello there! The vegetation does not show up when I do a Camera.RenderToCubemap. Any ideas how to make it work?

Edit: I put the code in LateUpdate and now it works (I'm toying with the new Stereo 360 rendering methods and it works fine with your asset just so you know!)

 

Hi ! Does VS work on Mac ? AMD GPU

 

Hi. You can use Vegetation Studio on Mac. In order to get instanced indirect rendering to work you need to enable Metal as rendering API. If you want to use OpenGL you need to set the grass to use Instanced rendering.

Lennart

 

Hi Roy.

You would have to use a tree shader that supports PBR lighting. Have you tried the Advanced Foliage Shader?
I have not tried an upgrade from Tree Creator trees but I think it would work. Better to ask on the AFS forum to be sure.

Lennart

 

Simumak simulators will include Vegetation Studio in our next release. Awesome work, @LennartJohansen

 

Im sorry if this has been asked already, but can I use Vegetation Studio on IOS and Android platforms?

 

Hi.

Vegetation Studio is designed to use compute shaders and the new instanced/instanced indirect graphics APIs.
While you can get it running on the latest models if ios and android mobiles I recommend pc or console hardware for best performance. on ios you probably need to set it to use instanced rendering, I do not think instanced indirect is supported yet.

for shader model 5.0 support you need an android platform with OpenGL ES 3.1+AEP

Lennart

 

Hi @LennartJohansen, I hope you are well. I had a method that updated the grass (root darkening etc) when it rained but it no longer works. Is there new API I can script too for changes to the grass look at runtime. I'm specifically trying to give it wetlook when my weather system is raining. (this is using your grass indirect instanced shader).

 

Hi. You would have to loop the materials in the VegetationSystem component. Find the public VegetationModelInfoList and update the materials. Test for the shader you want or the index (i) of the vegetationItem you want to change.

I will try to make an API where you can request materials based on shader name and/or VegetationItemID and you can update those.

Code (csharp):

1.  
2.  
3. for (int i = 0; i <= VegetationModelInfoList.Count - 1; i++)
4. {      
5.             for (int j = 0; j <= VegetationModelInfoList[i].VegetationMaterialsLOD0.Length - 1; j++)
6.             {
7.                // test for your shader and update the material
8.             }
9.  
10.             for (int j = 0; j <= VegetationModelInfoList[i].VegetationMaterialsLOD1.Length - 1; j++)
11.             {
12.                  // test for your shader and update the material
13.             }
14.  
15.             for (int j = 0; j <= VegetationModelInfoList[i].VegetationMaterialsLOD2.Length - 1; j++)
16.             {
17.                 // test for your shader and update the material
18.             }
19.  }
20.  

Let me know if you have any issues

Lennart

 

Hey there, I +1 the requests for info on streaming. I just picked up VS today and have plans to use WorldStreamer as well.

 

I bought Cascade the other day and had to try the Vegetation Studio integration. It's awesome Vegetation Studio mask generation at the click of a button.

 

I always thought I needed trees. Turned out that grass alone can be nice too




Some more with Cascade (apologies for cross-post there, but I wanted to give credit to both assets)

 

Needs more fire. : D

 

Does anyone have any tips or tricks to set texture exclusions to keep vegetation from being on them? I have 8 textures and 20 plants, do I have to go to each of the 20 plants individually and set each one to not show up on the textures? That seems like a very counter productive way to go about it. Is there a way to at least do it from the texture and just say "dont spawn any veg on this texture at all"?

 

Hi.

For now you need to set this up per plant, but I will add a set of global exclude rules you can add for all vegetation.

Lennart

 

Understood. I appreciate it. I was hoping someone might have workaround, like copy and pasting out of meta files or something, you never know, lol.

 

I just picked this up today when I saw the price go down a bit. Looks great, can't wait to try it out.

 

you can add one grass. set up the exclude rule and duplicate it a few times. then change the textures and spawn rules.

 

Hi all
we have released Cascade 1.0.1 ver2 that is live on Unity Asset Store
We improved the integration with Awesome Vegetation Studio.
Assets work fully in sync. Thanks @LennartJohansen for his great asset,

 

Ah, there we go. : D That works, lol. I have some 20+ I wanted to use, so it would have been a pain. I guess that leads to my next question, how many types are too many? Same with terrain textures, I saw somewhere it said it's not a good idea to use more than 4 because of each one requiring 4 of something? I can't remember if it was draws or what it was. I am using CTS though, I don't know if that makes a difference?

 

Good afternoon, Lennart.
Baked Vegetation is easy to re-position/delete manually.
So What if I bake all the "run-time spawn" vegetation into Baked Vegetation? Any kind of loss, lowes FPS ?
(or I shouldn't do it on a big terrain, because "run-time spawn" vegetation is preferable and "better", and faster and so on?)
Or no difference?
Thank you!

 

Hi.

Rendering speed of the vegetation is the same if it is spawned run-time or loaded from the storage, but loading from the storage is faster when moving around the terrain. You get faster load time at the cost of diskspace/memory to hold the instances.

Each method has some benefits over the other

Run-time spawning

• Will spawn vegetation on run-time procedural terrains
• Changes if you change splat or heightmap run-time. You call an update function with the changed bounds
• No need to store millions of vegetation instances on very large terrains
• Density change from a setting. Lower density grass on low end computers etc.

Loading from storage

• Faster loading
• Manual edit of vegetation.
• Import trees from existing terrains
• API for 3rd party tools adding instances

VegetationMasks will work run-time with both solutions.

Lennart

 

Hi.

With CTS you can use up to 16 textures with a single pass of the terrain rendering. The original unity terrain shader has to do a pass per 4 textures.

There is no problem to do 20+ prototypes, but less prototypes usually gives more of each grass/plant type and larger batches that can be instanced together. Less drawcalls...

Lennart

 

Will the ability to change vegetation density be added to persistent storage as well?

 

Yes, I want to add reducing density, but increasing will not be possible.

Lennart

 

Any tips for further increasing performance out of Speed Tree and VS?

I'm using GPU Instancing and I'm only getting a 10 or 20% performance increase from regular speed tree with VS. Not nearly enough for VR.

 

If Vegetation Studio ‘Vegetation Mask Area’ scripts are enabled, the Vegetation Studio terrain raise/lower mode will not lower terrain points when SHIFT is held, perhaps because the script locks out SHIFT which it traps when deleting mask points. Raising terrain points works. Disabling the scripts allows the terrain edit tools to trap the SHIFT key.

 

You have the VegetationMaskArea on the same gameobject as the terrain?

Lennart

 

Hi.

I will send you a pm to look at your setup. See if there is any adjustments to do.

Lennart

 

Yes, I have several masks on the terrain's gameObject.

 

Try to create a new GameObject to add the masks to. It can be a child of the terrain if you want. They do not have to be on the terrain. That should fix the shift key issue and you would gain the ability to move, rotate and scale the masks with changing the gameobject transform.

Lennart

 

I am using a Vegetation Mask for spawning different trees and grasses on a location.
In this vegetation mask which is pretty big I have created an object which is a field of prefabs. This one also has a Vegetation Mask which should exclude the trees of the big mask before or should simply remove all trees.
How do I handle this? Right now nothing is removed at all. The trees have the option "Use with Vegetation Mask" Vegetation Type 1.

And an option question:

Couldn't get his fixed. No one has the same issue?

Cheers
Ronny

 

I get some errors when building for linux:

Despite the errors the build is successful and the resulting dedicated server works (has no graphics card).

 

Touch React

Hi. We just found a small setup issue with the grass touch bend system and Enviro. It turns out that enviro uses layer 31 for some invisible rendering to a camera buffer. Vegetation Studio does the same. Change the layer on the Touch React component (setting in the inspector) to some other layer you do not use. I have changed the default layer to 29 for the next update of Vegetation Studio.

Lennart

 

The compile error is on my list. I will try to reproduce and fix it. It is only used in the editor. Should not affect any build.

Lennart

 

Hi.

1. could you try to set this up in a simple project and send me on a pm? Then we look at how it should work.
2. The collision detection on trees is using an internal grid system to detect collision. It currently only works on trees. The colliders are not used for this detection. Raycasting is currently to slow and only single threaded, but it looks like the Job system might open up for this soon...

Lennart

 

I wonder if either of these have to do with why I cant see my player through the camera? My player is set to layer 31, but in Enviro I have Satellite and Moon either on their own blank layer and I have camera and player set properly for their prefabs. I think Opsive TPS or some other asset has my player set to 31, can't remember which off hand.

 

You could have a layer setup problem, but it is not the same problem as this. This issue would only affect a touch buffer rendered to the GPU.

Lennart

 

Very nice project, well done sir

 

Yeah, sorry, I was mostly thinking out loud. I changed VS to use layer 15, so I think that my player now is the only thing using 31. You said Enviro uses 31 for invisible rendering, and my player is invisible, so made me wonder. Is it only that moon and satellite options though? I changed their drops downs to new layers, or is there something else coded somewhere that is outside of those?