Speedtree experiences

I just downloaded the free Speedtree package and played around for a while.
Here are my first experiences, proposals and questions:

First of all, when camera is close to a tree, they all look nice to me, better than the old Unity-Trees.
But:

1. Windzone:
Responding to Unity Windzone Object is limited on the "Main"-Property, the other properties are ignored.
Adjusting the value smoothly responds after a delay of some seconds, which is kind of bulky to me.
A value between 0.15-0.2 delivers acceptable movements of the branches/leaves (which looks better than before, while the frequency looks far too flurry and unrealistic to me, unless you want to simulate a highspeed-storm or something).

We can adjust the "Wind quality" on the tree-asset itself, but this only lets us chose between some presets.
There´s no control on the frequency/turbulence....that the Unity Windzone provided before.

I really want to have back some more controls on the movement as we had before.
And please - try to make it kind of intuitive.

2.The leaves and branches (use cutoff shaders? and ) have no AA on them, right?

3. Billboarding
Damn, billboarding needs some serious revision. Look at the attachment. No billboard when looking from above!?
There´s a pointraster visible in the area where trees transform from 3d to billboard.
Billboarded trees look kind of "cheap" (due to cutout shader? and compression?).
All the settings do not respond in realtime you have to hit "Apply"....

After all, is there an official documentation on Speedtrees in Unity?

 

You had no problems with speedtree on your terrain?
I created terrain and have the sample trees on it and unity crashed evwrytime I pressed play. Last night before sending a bug report, it would work with a couple of trees but populate a terrain and Unity took a nose drive.

 

Had no problems with speedtrees on terrain object using b13

 

Ah hmm I'm trying it b14. Thanks.

 

Just tried b14, no problems

 

Interesting. Really it is cause this is my scene and when i press play in the Editor, Unity just crashes.
It has both the Broadleaf_Desktop and the Conifer_Desktop tree in it. And that is only one terrain.
The terrain was created with Terrain Composure. That has nothing to do with it due to it using Unity basic terrain.

 

Did it last night after talking to both TC maker and Hippo
Case #651385

 

I think currently the wind settings are exported with the model, so you'd have to define how the model reacts to wind in the speedtree editor before it's exported.

I'm sure we'd all prefer if freq/turb settings are not "baked" into the model with no way to control them at runtime.

 

Is the modeller (19€/month) cancellable per month or do we buy a one-year subscription?

Exactly :-(

 

Yeah you can subscribe for one month if you want.

 

The billboards looking flat from above is a massive thing for me, and means that Speedtree is not an option as it currently stands. Can we please get the addition of billboards working correctly from above looking down?

 

is the wind zone not working with speedtree in terrain, or i missing something?

 

Read my first post above ;-)

 

Ahh....so that's what it's mean....sorry, kinda confused here

 

There is changes in Unity trees in the 4.6 too but not Speedtree and they billboard very badly and to paint them on the terrain hardly works anymore - you are left with many trees with some or more of the trunk exposed and only the small part of the trunk touching the terrain. Earlier it was much better than that.

 

I asked the speedtree developers for support, here´s their answer:

Hello,

Thank you for your interest in SpeedTree in Unity.

The integration is a combination effort between SpeedTree and Unity. We mostly handle the importer and wind shaders, and Unity handles the rendering. Asking questions on their forum, as you did, is probably the best way to get help from the correct people.

To answer your questions briefly...

1) The windzone still has information that pertains to both SpeedTrees and Unity's tree editor. SpeedTrees currently only use direction and strength. If you wish to edit how the tree reacts, you would do that inside the SpeedTree Modeler:

http://docs.speedtree.com/doku.php?id=windwizard
http://docs.speedtree.com/doku.php?id=advancewind

2) To get antialiasing on alpha masked geometry, you will want to turn on multisampling and A2C (AlphaToMask). I believe the SpeedTree shaders already have this, but I will check.

3) We render a top-down billboard in the billboard atlas, but I am unsure if Unity can use it at this time. Quality is completely controllable by you, by changing the billboard atlas size in the tree properties in the Modeler or by moving the LOD closer or farther away.

Hope this helps

--
- Greg Croft
- IDV / SpeedTree
- http://www.speedtree.com

 

So, where´s the top-down billboard???

 

Have you filed a bugreport? I'm not a unity developer, but since the material and textures have different atlas coordinates and still use the right texture part it seems that there is functionality for all billboards, but the switch does not work yet.

 

Just curious, how about PBL for speedtree??? are this material convertion happened in unity or speedtree need to change something for this??

 

1. Wind zone has always been strange for me in Unity. But speedtrees are now a lot ahead of the old Unity trees
2. AA - they use alpha to coverage (A2C) AA if you use MSAA in the project. Looks nice, but only in Forward and Deferred paths. Legacy deferred with DX11 cause visual glitches.
3. Vertical billboard - it's all about the way, how they do it. Old Unity trees were calculated in place. SpeedTrees already have a texture with calculated billboards. No vertical billboards calculated so far.

Also, the shader is very interesting beast here - probably it's diffuse only shader. As I tested, even fake specular values not working. Maybe Unity will improve it before final release

 

+1, need top-down billboard. it was not implemented as of beta 14.

the trees on speedtree store are not PBR, andI think the speedtree shaders are not PBR either.

I feel like the trees are going to stick out like sore thumbs if you're using them in a scene where everything else is using PBR.

I asked the guys at speedtree and they said "you can render the trees however you want", and that it's a surface shader. I'm not familiar with shader coding though.

 

You can use your own shaders, unitys pbr-standard-shader work, but you will lose wind movement. Since the source is available, it shouldn't be that hard to put wind in them.

 

"Sample Trees for Unity Subscription" (no version number given by SpeedTree, but there were created 5th of Nov 2014) still permanently cause crashes when stopping the game play when used with Unity 5.0.18b.

 

I have no problems with free speedtree sample trees and unity 5 b17. I dont know with b18

 

I've tried this, and the trees lose the branch intersection blending (they use multi-texturing). they look horrible on the seams. I might have been doing something wrong, not entirely sure, all I know is that it's not as simple as changing the shader.