Rome: Truly AAA Quality Exterior Enviroment Pack for Unity

I muuuuuch prefer to have all my little pieces available, including individual textures, as I can very easily mesh combine and either atlas or do texture arrays ... or add/swap textures if I want some alternatives. I'm not happy when an asset tries too hard to make things efficient - doing their own mesh combining and atlasing - because usually in the end I'm not doing things the way they are and I end up discarding the asset.

 

I use it!! I even make my own parts. The tools available are not that much work really. Better to have the extra parts for those of us who like that level of detail and then allow the users to merge themselves.

 

Not sure if it was already asked but for those of us that own Substance, are the Substances included with the Rome pack 1 and/or Rome pack 2 just the final substance material/texture or does it include the files that can be loaded into substance to make even further modifications to?

I'm relatively new to Substance but I believe it's the .sbs file and anything of the like that I am talking about. Really love your two projects.

 

Thanks @Mlackey !

To keep the price under 100$, I exclude the SBS files. RFP1 and 2 only have the exported textures from Designer. If you want the SBS's I can sell them seperately.

 

I would absolutely love the option to purchase them (separate sets of course) if the price is reasonable.

 

It is not only about combine meshes, but also surfaces, etc...and you cant combine everything, because you would lose advantage of frustum culling. But this was not my point. My point was, that such modularity is in theory nice, but in reality just adds some extra work. So for example prefabs should already come optimized, not have 2x more meshes and surfaces than necessary. So now I am going through the pack and merging surfaces and meshes in prefabs together, to have more optimized version. I cant afford to give to my level designers unoptimized prefabs, it would cause huge issues lately and optimization would be far more complicated.

I am not complaying, the pack is excellent. This is just practical remark. I dont understand, why everybody does take it personally :/

 

No one is taking it personally. Just expressing that some of us do use all of the modular parts. It allows us to build unique structures and have more control on what we see.

In the first pack, I would build my structures and then merge them together. It made it much easier to use. I did not merge the entire scene though, just reusable structures built from the modular parts. It worked well for me.

The point is the purpose of a modular pack is to give you the bits and pieces you can use sort of like lego blocks. Optimization is up to the user, not the one who creates the models.

 

I might be interested too!

 

I am quite curious, what you will be able to build.

 

Good to know that the .sbs files would be available for purchase if need be... but what about .sbsar's? Even if it was only for a few of the more common elements, that would allow us to keep the quality levels up and the file sizes down.

 

FYI, I'm having a similar problem with the volume 2 update that I had previously. You include a distribution of Jason Booth's vertex painter pro in the set, which completely stuffs up my Unity editor since I already have that tool installed (it's open source, and I believe @jbooth includes it with Megasplat. I forgot that I needed to uncheck that component when installing the update, and so it's gone and screwed things up again. Moving forward, if you could either find a way to detect that it's already installed and not install a duplicate conflicting copy, or just not include it and instead include a link with instructions so that those who do not already have Jason's tool can go grab it easily... that would save a lot of time and frustration.

 

Including my vertex painter in your asset is against the license. Please remove it immediately, or I'll be forced to contact Unity and have them remove your asset for a violation of my license.

 

For those wondering WTF, jbooth modified his license a year ago stating the Vertex Painter could not be included in Asset Store content. I only found this out today. Obviously I had no cause to recheck the license as I included it in RFP1 2 years ago before it was modified. And for the record, I never claimed it to be my own work.

No worry. It will be removed from both packs shortly.

 

This is lesson I made many years ago. Never ever use 3rd party plugins for your core business. At the end, It only makes you headeache (changes in licence, no updates to last engine versions, stopped support, etc...). Now we are using only core functionality or our custom solutions (we are try to limit these us much as possible) and our life is much more simple.

 

Yep. To clarify, users of RFP1 and RFP2 aren't in any violation of licensing terms. You're fine.

I'm switching the packs over to use Polybrush. While it doesn't use Unity's (broken) additionalVertexStreams and creates a custom mesh per instance, it will fit the bill and it's free on the asset store.

 

I'm sorry to have caused any kind of kerfuffle. For what it's worth, I thought the way it had been included (displaying the license clearly) was straightforward and made authorship clear. The trouble I was having was that if I didn't spot and take the time to untick the folder during installation or update, it wasn't seeing my previously installed copy, installing another one, and causing the Unity editor to have issues.

 

Yeah, I had people basically packaging up my code with a few examples and trying to sell it on the asset store.

Note that you can bake out unique mesh assets from the baking option in Utilities if you want to get rid of the vertex instance stream usage (which breaks batching in Unity - there's an option for doing this on whole scene as part of a build step in MegaSplat). Really, Unity should allow you to save asset files right into the scene data, which would make the workflow much easier for this kind of thing (they demo'd this a while back but never shipped it).

 

You have full right to put into licence whatever you want. So OK. BUT acoording to my opinion you are silly. Your product is free and nobody was taking you your ownership, authorship was in this case clear. So no harm to you or anybody done. If I were you, I would give permission to use this in this pack and dont cause troubles just because you can.

 

I can see his side of the argument though. If people were just taking his code and selling it, that's something I'd try to prevent as well. Modifying the license is the only thing he can do.

Honestly, Unity shouldn't have the open door policy to content submission that it currently has. People don't need 50 vertex painters in the store.

 

Well, they want money, so they will not stop it. And on the other side this is Unity fault. Terrain engine was obsolete 5 years ago, now it is bad joke. Decals support is standard 2-3 years, ocean/weather systems are now standard too. Vertex painting is also standard. People are missing these things badly, so they produce their own systems. Then they sell it on asset store, after that find out that supporting any application on Unity is hell on earth, so they quit. So another person writes similar application and story continues. Now we have 10 terrain system, dozens vertex painters, dozen ocean systems.....So bulding game on such 3rd party system is suicide, 99% percent of these plugins is dead during 1 year. So you have to write your own system, to be not dependent. And that takes TONs of time.

Exacly because of this we quit Unity and switched to serious engine. And productivity went 100% up, instead of writing what was missing we started to actually make game. No troubles with missing features, everyting important is out of box there, and roadmaps make sense according to current trends. I am recommending Unity to students for simple student school projects, but for any serious game project hands away.

 

Hmm, so now it adds a custom mesh per instance that we do not need? And we need Megasplat to bake that away?

Confused as to how a non-coder like me is supposed to figure this out. lol

Any chance you could add a bit of documentation for those of us who just want to paint and tweak? Destroying batching is not a good thing. I do not want that to happen.

 

Unless this does not work in the version of Unity that you're using, you could simply download it from this (the author's) github repository.

 

Well, you dont need to do anything, that vertex tool can be downloaded for free on web page of author. Author only had moral problem with distribution together with rome pack.

 

@Teila No no. Just pretty much ignore the debate that's happening and wait a day for me to update things for everyone.

It's best to just download PolyBrush from the Asset Store and use that for decal painting and such in the Rome Fantasy Packs. It's Unity's official vertex manipulation tool that they bought from the good folks at ProCore3D. I tested it and found that you can do the additionalVertexStreams functonality or bake the meshes, so you can either have the meshes instanced as usual or baked uniquely.

I'm in the middle of updating all the packs, the forum thread, and will produce a video on it shortly. Sorry for the confusion everyone.

 

Side note: For Rome Fantasy Pack I users, I'm updating all the shaders in the pack so they're matching functionality with Rome Fantasy Pack II. This means more parallax surfaces and Amplify Shader editing capability. Plus there are some prefab bugs that were introduced at some point that I fixed as well.

 

Thanks! No hurry.

 

JBooth's vertex painter needs some udpates to work with 2017. I made those updates for RFP2, but that's all moot now. Use PolyBrush.

 

Polybrush looks like a really slick tool (I've watched a couple videos, but have not yet spent any time using it), and bonus points for it being on the roadmap for Unity integration.

 

Hi @trilobyteme

I can recommend ProGrids specially and then ProBuilder as well.
Both previously paid for assets now 100% free.
And yes, getting them for FREE, makes crap like this to not happen.
Future integration with the Unity Editor will be interesting to see. So many reviews on the paid for versions had comments about why it was not just part of Unity already.

 

Ok folks. Both Rome packs are updated to divorce itself from @jbooth 's Vertex Painter.

Rome Pack I got some more updates, namely:
- All material textures are now non-SRGB so roughness is more accurate
- All shaders have been updated to Amplify shaders so we are in feature parity with the Unreal Engine versions of Rome.
- Various prefab mesh issues are fixed that were introduced at some point due to a unity version upgrade.
- Vertex Painter removed. PolyBrush recommended for decal painting.

The new workflow for decal painting in both packs is outlined in the view video:

​

 

Thanks!!!

 

CorbelB is not capped from top, but it should be.

 

Indeed. It's on my list of to-do's

 

I see Allegorithmic is using Rome 2 to promote their new Substance Academy.

... Aaaand also the new Substance plugin for peeps using 2018.1 and above.

 

Was going to post this !
Still too scared to jump into unity 2018, too many changes.

 

It's a developing branch. I'm grateful for the LTS, and I think I'm going to stick with it.

 

Thanks for finding this! I didn't know it was out

I'm going to jump into 2018 today and poke around.

 

And now the tileable sbsar files are included the asset !
Many thanks, awesome stuff.

 

Hooray for the shout-out in the Allegorithmic Substance video!

 

Has anyone had any luck using either pack with baked GI? The indoor scenes don't bake properly for me. Unity complains about overlapping UVs.

 

Nevermind. My latest baking attempt succeeded.

 

Any idea if the packages will be updated for HDRP ?
I guess the new substance plugin make it a little harder.

 

I don't have a date, but if you are using Amplify Shader, that's how the shaders were authored. Amplify apparently supports HDRP so have at it if you need it sooner rather than later!

 

I don't have amplify, but it's ok, I'm still waiting till all this 2018 stuff actually starts to set in.

They're changing a lot of stuff too fast, but it's great knowing you have it in mind, thanks !

 

Hey Pete long time.

Curious, I was popping RFP1 into the very latest update of Unity (2018.2.12f1) and just Importing as-is, I have a missing script on the camera, and the Post Processing Stack is now the Layers/Volumes one, and your PP doesn't work. I believe the camera script is the FPS one iirc? As for the PP, it's not crucial as I can just create my own, but perhaps it might not hurt to have a fresh one out of the box?

..speaking of Post Processing, I wasn't able to get Screen Space Reflections to work with your materials?

Cheers man!

-Steven

 

Just picked up RFP2...gorgeous but the demo scene as-is looks terrible out of the box in 2018 after generating lighting...

...any thoughts on this?

 

Maybe post a picture, for comparison's sake?

 

Sure thing. Mind you there's nothing special beyond Importing RFP2 into 2018 and lighting the demo scene:

 

I went with my typical Enlighten values for 'The Sun' and such, Forward rendering (VR) and I added AO, Auto-Exposure, Bloom and Color Grading to the new Post Process Stack v2. It makes the scene look much better, but it's missing that 'grounded' feeling that Peter achieved in his screenshots...so yea could definitely use some guidance, perhaps material-wise or whatnot (maybe adjustments need to be made in shader/maps?)

 

IDK ... good question. You've got a missing script on the camera; not sure if that's an issue.

I think a bit of what's missing is shadow quality. Lights and shadows (plus AO) give depth, and that, plus reflected light, are what gives you a "grounded" feel. I imagine you've tweaked your settings for GI, SSR, reflection probes, shadow distance, light bounces, and all of that, so you know what they all do in the scene. Your final version is not that bad to me, though the contrast, I guess, is much higher than in the pic used to promote the Rome II pack.

What you might do is increase your light strength and decrease the contrast (exposure?). I think that will get you closer to the version below.