3D Rocky Hills Environment Pack - Development Thread

Added more trees... In the mean time I'm gonna improve upon some things like the textures and tiles, I'll level up some things, especially the rocks, look way too blurry at 2k. I made this pack semi PBR it's gonna get a bit of cosmetics.

 

Golden versions of the leaves. I made my fixes, now to upload soon.

 

I'm almost done, gonna have it submitted within the next 2 days max. This desperately needs the update right now to be in line with Unity 2019 and to work properly.

 

Submitted the update just now, will notify when it's online!!

 

Rocky Hills Environment - Pro Pack:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packag...capes/rocky-hills-environment-pro-pack-111436

Just got updated to version 2.1!

 

Just tried some ray tracing on my nature assets.

 

few more...

 

On vacation right now so it's gonna be a while till I get back to making updates for this pack but I just want to present my final lighting render in Unity! My asset in Unity with mixed real-time ray tracing.

 

This is a really nice asset
I wish the trees were a little more plug-and-play - I had the same issues with almost invisible leaves mentioned earlier, but I'll try to follow the instructions when I have more time.

The grass is really nice and works well when I just use the FBX models and paint detail - it moves around the terrain in wind zones though. I think there's a trick with the alphas on the vertex colors, to control how much wind affects a model - it's a fairly old thread so I don't know if it's still relevant:
https://answers.unity.com/questions/16834/wind-detail-meshes-are-moved-by-wind-back-and-fort.html

I like your ground textures a lot - are they the same you're offering here - https://assetstore.unity.com/packag...y-hills-ground-textures-with-vegetation-59961 , or is there something in the texture pack not included here?
Perhaps putting ground textures in a separate folder would help one save some time when setting up terrain layers.

 

Thanks for the feedback! I have tried the mesh vertex trick on the terrain but it didn't work for me as a Blender user, besides all the meshes already have vertex colors as it's needed to make the wind work with the CTI shaders. That's alright because there's plenty of solutions for terrain and grass on the store and my assets should work with this: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/terrain/advanced-terrain-grass-100014

The terrain textures are definitely not included in that pack. That pack is very old and am considering depreciating it or adding it to the free one in the future. Oh, the ground texture folder is an excellent idea, perhaps terrain deserves a dedicated folder!

As for CTI installation instructions, it's not that hard! Here's an easy video to guide you:

After you did that install the 2018 pack from the folder if you're using Unity 2018 and newer *2019 and you're good to go!

 

I'll take a look at it Right now I'm trying to level up my terrain building skills so I'll probably give it a go once 2019.3 comes out. Do you know if it's realistic to get this to work with LWRP/URP?

 

Yes it is, I think there is a LW support pack inside. It already supports LW but HD is still in preview for CTI.

 

The pack definitely works with LWRP but the features are very limited. All you have to do is install the CTI-LW pack from the folder, it has an example but that won't replace anything so you'll have to replace all the materials with the LW ones yourself. It also has a different kind of texture setup for the shaders so that means you won't have translucency. What this means is that I have to stop being lazy and add LW versions of the tree textures in the pack. It also works for HD but only a specific version as it's still in preview.

 

I decided to try installing 2019.3 beta and try it out. Yes it does work with LWRP, thanks
The grass is a bit tricky. When I try to paint as detail to terrain there must be some other shader taking over, only getting the albedo texture from the material? I'm not sure but I'll probably have to take a look at the Advanced Terrain Grass asset you showed me because the vanilla terrain engine detail painting truly sucks compared to prefabs I have placed on the ground (using LWRP Simple Lit shader).
The game I'm developing is an "isometric" Action RPG and I think the grass and terrain assets can get me very close to the look I'm searching for for outdoor scenes, while still being playable on integrated graphics.
The terrain textures blend pretty well I think, and I haven't really tested all of them yet either.
I still have to play a little more with the bushes and trees.

 

Yeah, unfortunately, the terrain details don't really work with Unity terrain. The grass gets replaced with its ugly terrain shader. The unity terrain is very limited also another trick I see people do is use grass as trees but I wouldn't recommend it, it affects performances lots, it's pretty horrible!! You could try that terrain grass solution although idk if it was updated lately and idk if it works for LW tbh.

Awesome, hope your game turns out well Btw do you really need to have anisotropic filtering off? it makes the foliage look like mush tbh! I would suggest having it to force on if it's not a huge impact on your performance.

 

There is so much I don't know about graphics in Unity. So far I've been focusing more on server code which is non-Unity C# as well as implementing features for the client.
Now the time has come when I have decided to learn all of this stuff and what settings to play with. I didn't even realize whether or not I had it on - this was just a quick test project to see if I could get URP working.
If I can't get details to work right with the plugin then I'll just go for prefabs, and I'm leaning towards that either way because I want to be able to place details on top of meshes as well as terrains and have them look the same. Perhaps mesh combining or DOTS might be a way to get rid of all of those silly grass gameobjects.
Luckily my game is "isometric", which greatly simplifies some things because I don't have to worry about my terrain being visible from far away.

 

Hahaha, sometimes I expect Unity to look right from the get go and I forget about setting up the graphics settings so I'm wondering why my stuff looks so bad, then I remember. The second time I forgot about the texture filtering was when I moved to a new version of unity and it had the option disabled by default and I was thinking that for some reason unity 5 looked far better than unity 2017 and I couldn't figure out why my grass looks like mush in 2017. I really don't see the benefits of having that option off in 2019 tbh, it just makes stuff look blurrier and muddier and I didn't see any games that look like that so far.

I would love to help out with grapix tips if you need any, in any case I think your game will look really good from a isometric view. Looking forwards!! Oh hope you find a good solution for that grass, stuff like this is always hard to figure out.

 

I'm featured in, World Building Mega Bundle!! Get it now really cheap for a limited time!

https://assetstore.unity.com/mega-bundles/world-building

 

Hello, I installed the asset, but it seems it does not look quite as it should ?

 

Read the installation instructions!! First of all, set your rendering to linear, that's basically gama rendering you have there, hence the reason everything looks fluorescent green.

1. In graphic settings -> player -> linear rendering. Here's an easy tutorial:

" When using deferred rendering make sure you add the "deferred shader" and "deferred reflections" components in the graphics window by replacing the default ones." (like in the video).

After you did step one, you should do step two if you are using unity versions 2018 and above.

2. For Unity 2018, 2019 and later just import the "2018 foliage shader fix" provided in the "CTI" folder otherwise your foliage will not render on-screen! (as is in your case)

3. If you want to use URP and HDRP, there are support packages inside, just install those but note that features for these pipelines are a bit limited!

Any other issues let me know! Good luck and enjoy!

 

Ok I think you might have it in linear which is good but you need to add the runtime components like in the instructions.

 

Hey, I've purchased the asset and I'm having trouble to play around with the FBX. For example, when I import GenericCliffCRHE_LOD0 to 3dsmax it comes with GenericCliffCRHE map but no bitmap assigned. Other FBX such as GenericCliffBRHE_LOD0 comes clean with no material assigned. Any guidance is much appreciated.
Thanks

 

The models have been imported in Unity without materials as clean empty meshes because the materials are done in Unity and get applied to unique prefabs. Reason why is because it's more effective and optimal while one or more prefabs can share the same model. My aim was to make everything modular for Unity. The meshes do keep mesh normals and UV information, all you have to do is use the prefabs from Unity as reference and apply the proper materials yourself in 3ds max (look for the corresponding materials and maps in Unity and apply it to your 3ds max model). Good luck creating!

 

Thanks for the updates on the pack, and those ray tracing pics look gorgeous

 

Thanks for purchasing and also trying out my stuff!! I might upload my stuff to Cryengine and Unreal, tow I kept working on stuff and never got the chance to try them out well. Perhaps after this, I will take a break and try.

 

I'm getting about 25-40fps in the demo scenes with forward rendering and linear colour space. I think gpu instancing is enabled for the materials too. Is there some configuration step I missed?

 

What's your specs and what demo scene have you tried out? If you have lower specs instancing might make it worst. If you're testing one of the bigger maps there might be a few factors:

A. Cause could be the mesh grass clumps. I had to mix a few with the terrain grass thus fps drops when you get close to them so it's recommended that you use something like Advanced Terrain grass or more optimized grass or just remove the mesh grass!! I couldn't get to implement and better grass solution. (For some reason the Fall map has the biggest frame drop, perhaps remove one of the directional lights, sometimes I add 2)!

B. Change the billboard fading on the plants and trees from "cross fading" to "regular fading"! That might be another one of the causes.

C. Lower some graphic settings like billboard distance or other settings if you still get low frame rate.

 

ryzen 2700
gtx 1080
32GB ram

I'll try what you suggested, thanks!

 

@florianalexandru05 I picked this up in the World Building Mega Bundle and was really looking forward to giving it a try. The screenshots looked very much like a Dragon's Dogma world and I like that look.

However, the poly counts listed in the asset store page had me concerned and now that I've tried it I can see the concern was warranted. In the RHEScene_UnityTerrain_Summer scene without any changes it clocks in at over 16 million polygons. For an 800x800 area that's absolutely insane. That's way too much even for much larger areas.

I increased pixel error to 20 and grass detail down to .1 and got it to around 15.8 million polys, but that's still ridiculous. This asset needs some serious optimization to be usable in a game. I'm very disappointed in the results I'm seeing. One system I tried on is only getting 14 FPS in this 800x800 area. The PC is not a beast, but it's not horrible either.

 

After changing from Ultra to Medium Quality I got performance way up and polygon count way down.



Still, this is a very small area and I believe the poly counts on some of the provided assets could probably be reduced some. I will try with some tools like MCS and VSP and see how it improves the performance. I may be able to use this after all.

 

The summer map is the biggest map, that particular area you are in is one of the heaviest because there are a lot of mesh grass clumps that aren't suited for optimization. Did you disable the mesh grass by any chance, I don't see it on screen? That is definitely one of the reasons you might get a frame drop also did you try the tips from above? In the hierarchy to the left go to the "CTI vegetation" sub prefab container and disable all the grass meshes in the map! You could try enabling instancing on the vegetation materials and disabling the cross-fade of the billboards. If you want to further optimize the trees by using the lowest lod levels instead of the highest! Also try baking occlusion culling!

Is your video card a "hp elitedesk 800 g1 video card" integrated card? I'm not sure how suitable for games that is? I have a I5, nvidia geforce 1050 ti and it runs at 40fps at ultra.

 

Thanks lots for purchasing in the bundle. I hope you can use it with success! I have to admit there are a lot of optimization issues, some of them are from the "Custom Tree Importer" shaders, some from unity itself and some on how dense I decided to make my assets. Most of the latency are shaders or Unity related issues. For fps I could blame it on my vegetation in your case. I won't be making lower poly assets than what I'm already making any time soon and I don't think there is anything more I could do on optimization tbh, there might be a few things which I'll look into on the next update tow. Try using the last lod levels and follow the tips from above or even attempt to use URP with the LW(URP) support pack! iIf you need anything please let me know!

 

No, it's an AMD FirePro W5100. But this is not my main system anyway. My main dev system is a geforce 1060 GTX. I will try on that one soon and see how it does.

I got rid of the grass clumps and used MCS on the rocks, props, and details and now I'm getting upwards over 100 fps. So, definitely a massive improvement. Thanks for the tips.

 

Yeah, I think the trees are definitely too dense. I will be using trees from other assets so no worries there. I mainly want to use the ground details/props and the rocks/cliffs.

 

You're welcome, I'm sure you'll manage, I'm happy it's better now . I first made this pack on my older potato and it worked pretty fine at the time, tow have to be guilty on exporting everything on the best settings. Better optimization on nature assets with Custom Tree importer is something I'm still trying to figure out.

 

@florianalexandru05 One thing that would be nice is if you provided ready made Vegetation Studio Pro vegetation packages/biomes to make it easy to just assign to VSP and not have to assign all the trees, grass, props, etc. manually.

 

Took that in to account, noted!!

 

Hey guys, I apologize for my absence but my PC broke a month ago! Now I finally got my PC back from the service today and it works just fine while in the meantime I managed to upgrade it a little bit with some extra ram. My motherboard broke so I was forced to change my CPU as well. It's been a long wait but I was thinking about how to improve this nature on the next update so time to set up a roadmap!
---

• Roadmap ❃

• Performance and features
• Vegetation Studio Pro vegetation packages/biomes
• HDR - URP package ready content
• Work on improving performance
• Batch atlas all 2k rocks into 4k atlases (Improve performance of the rocks)
• Attempt making more optimized grass
• Add Upload to Unity 2019
• As an addition, convert all trees to terrain trees
• Write PDF
• Remove real-time reflection probes
• Make tree grass

• Art aesthetics
• Fix PBR textures v3
• Remake bigger cliff textures into 4k
• Make more realistic and optimized flat rocks and cliffs using detail maps
• Remake dead stump models
• Add additional stumps
• Add more splats
• Add CTI bottom detail bark material on the generic beech trees

(This will probably be the last update!)
*The price may or may not increase to 48$ or higher!

 

Hey man, I took another look at my big summer map as I was doing some performance tests. I updated my pc with slightly better parts and added 8G ram more since my pc broke last month and I found that my map runs allot worst for some reason. I found the main culprit for it was the reflection probe encompassing the entire terrain. Remove the real-time reflection probe on the entirety of the terrain!! Honestly, I couldn't imagine it would have such a terrifying impact on performance. My frame rate was getting low fps spikes down to 30-20 fps. After removing the probes I got 60fps at all times even with all the particles and my "Next-gen Soft Shadows" addon on. The only places where the framerate drops to 50-40-30 fps is where you zoom in on the "cti" grass mesh and I have to admit my grass is not well optimized for games at all!! I'll try to do something about that.

Here are my pc specs:
CPU: Intel Core i5-9600K - 3.70GHz
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti
Ram: 16G (had only 8G before)

I'll be uploading some videos of my tests soon. This was good research for myself and future projects. I'll definitely work on optimization a bit more tow my main target is not mobile devices and it will never be my main focus so my models will always have as much poly as possible for PC and console. I'm also getting good performance at about 60-50 fps with ray tracing lighting like SEGI and SSRT which I'm really pleased about. I'll write every performance optimization tip I can in a pdf and add it in with proper setup and instructions.

Thanks again for each one of your feedbacks!

 

Not a very successful test and the video turned out blurry so I gotta figure out what I did wrong. Might delete this later! In any case, a look at my framerate, with obvious spike drops in frame rate here and there. So far, this is the frame rate with only normal post-processing effect and nothing more. Slight frame drop because of recording but in unity it runs at 60-70 fps.

I recommend you view it in 1080p or you won't see anything!!

 

Hi, just wondering, what framerate is seen at runtime, away from the editor, would that not increase the FPS?

 

You mean in play mode or as a working build? I think builds should increase the frame rate tow I doubt it can be higher I'm not sure, I never made a built before. The book of the dead is laggy in the editor but demo works pretty well for example.

 

Looks like there ara a problem with the LOD:

 

I think that might be because of the latest version of Unity 2019? Did you also install the 2018 fix pack from the folder? It's for 2019 two. So far looks like it's working alright aside from that. If that doesn't fix it you can ask for support here: https://forum.unity.com/threads/released-custom-tree-importer.263224/page-13
Remember to make a backup of the "CTI folder" before making any changes!

 

A few unrelated tips, makes sure the wind is working by changing the value of the wind emitter setting your wind emitter or hitting play! Also if you have bad frame rate in my example maps remove the real-time reflection probes altogether.

Any red error messages?

 

Ok If you did all the installation by the book then I think it might be the crossfading of the LOD groups. Turn that off and tell me if it works!

 

Ok now after installing the 2018 fix pack.

 

Glad it works!

 

A demo here flying FPV in the big map:

 

Have to admit I love watching a fly trough and by default, the frame rate looks pretty sturdy. That's awesome! Btw I would advise a wind strength of "0.2, 0.4" max, at a value of "1" it's already storm level wind and will affect the performance.

Thanks for sharing, keep it up!