Terrain Trees and HDRP

Hi all,

So i've read a few posts/articles showing that painting trees through the terrain tool is not really supported with HDRP. While I have built my own shader and overwritten the trees and it seems to work, all the 'features' like billboarding and lod don't look right (possibly just settings, im new to this).

Anyway my question is - is it even worth painting 'trees' onto the terrain with the built in tool or should i just place the models onto the scene myself?

I have only 11 scenes, all relatively small, so even if it's time consuming it's still doable. I'm likely going to be doing custom shaders for everything anyway. I have not played with optimization yet, so not sure how much effort the built in tool is saving me, but I am noticing it requires a lot of configuration and prefab building to get your own trees working as intended. And even then can you place non-tree objects this way, or easily 'move' them around after they are placed?

Also would procedurally generated trees be better or worse overall? My main goal is graphics quality, followed closely by speed/optimization.

Thanks,
Primoz

 

how many trees are you trying to place? Because it will take down a lot of the processing..
for me i think creating your own way of processing trees and placing them is much better than the built in method the problem is that it will take time and thats basically the problem

 

No matter the Rendering Pipeline, placing trees with the terrain tool is not the best choice. When you place trees manually you have total control of all the trees (in-scene), as long as you use a prefab workflow (changes made to the root tree prefab, changes all of them), makes it easier.

You are not saving anything performance-wise using the terrain tool, in fact the opposite. Drag a tree prefab into the scene, adjust it to how you like (basic), then drag back into the folder, and create a prefab. Manually place all trees from that root prefab, Blam!, now any change to the root prefab, effects/updates them all. This can be applied to any foliage, rocks, stumps, etc.