[Released] Tropical Forest Pack

I just went through the textures assigned to the material and found the diffuse was, in fact, set for normal. I don't recall hitting anything to import the map as a normal, but that doesn't mean I didn't, lol. Thanks for the quick response! All good now.

 

Great! Glad you got it working. I sure hope they did not make the texture import fix option automatic. That would not be good. Will grab 2017.2 soon to see.

Cheers

 

I generally attribute issues to other assets or my own intervention or incompetence more than anything, haha. I created a clean project in 2017.1.2f1, did the import fresh and this time I did see the import message. Guessing I was

I am seeing an awful lot of pixellation of the water particles.





Seems to be a shader issue. I have imported a couple other smoke/fog shaders and they don't seem to have that issue.

 

Oh okay. Glad it is not automatic. You scared me

Yes this is the shader. It is dithered. Main reason I did not include the waterfall as a feature is because of the shaders. I needed to use deferred effects because I can not find a way for image effects and fog to work nicely with forward shaders. So only way in Shader Forge is a dithered Deferred shader. It works with effects but is not pretty. Same goes for the water and waterfall shader. Just an ugly hack to get it working. Otherwise the particles, water, and waterfall will be clear as day when further in the jungle. Found that a lot more scene breaking than the dithered effect.

Sure there are better paid shaders that could be used to replace the included. I just can not include them of course.

 

Ok, I was just making sure it wasn't an unexpected behavior. Smoke/fog shaders are a real pain to get working with lighting and shading decently well. We have several purchased shaders for smoke and we have to switch which ones to use based on the project since none of them are a one-size-fits-all.

 

Yeah getting particle shaders to work properly is a pain. Would think you have had to spend a bit more time than you would like with them when working with any of your projects especially because of the sea environment. Water just adds to the misery of sorting issues.

Let me know if you have any issues or questions.

 

@Baldinoboy Do you think you might record a short video of how to set up Lars Bertram's Colormap Ultra Terrain Shader 3.0? This would be very nice!!

 

Hi @hermie,

It is a tutorial I would like to do and do plan to do. Especially for a future project. Biggest pain with setting up CMU 3 is getting all the maps to have the same size and import settings so that they can be setup. I made sure to already do this step for TFP 1.1 so that you do not have to worry about that setting up the different maps. The rest is pretty simple and when I have time I will look into making a tutorial for it.

Just a warning though I am horrible at speaking

 

No, I heard your voice in the other videos, it was great. Or wasn't that you?

 

Thanks. The tutorial videos for this pack was me.

 

Do you think you can do it today in a quick and dirty way? I would so much like to try it.

 

Sorry but I can not at the moment. Even done as quick as I can it will still take a few hours to setup, record, edit, compress, and upload. I should have some time off from work Sunday and will try to make one then.

Cheers

 

Thank you in advance!

 

I have a question, please. I know it's not your business to answer me, but a helping hand would be very nice anyways...
I tried to rebuild your scene to isolate a problem that I'm having with the Lux Plus shaders and the CTI shaders.
Now I'm stuck at the beginning already.

Do you perhaps immediately see what my problem is here? It seems that I just get rid of that blue-ish tint. Your scene looks much "greener" without any image effects attached.
When I add reflection probes, everything looks a little greener, but not much. Is that because I just don't have enough green objects in my scene or because of something else?
I tried to set the lighting up as you did, I used the same skybox, and I sat the same lighting settings.
Also, only if you want to, could you tell me how you managed to get these sun shafts on the coconuttree in the screenshot? I just don't see it.
Thank you very very much in advance!

 

Hey @hermie,

You can ask me anything in regards to Unity and my pack. It is my business and I enjoy doing it so no problem . Sorry for not getting the video. I need to do that too but time to do it is just hard to come by. Will try again this weekend.

Yeah the lighting change is due to the filled scene with reflection probes capturing more green and brown than blue of the sky like you get in an empty scene. That is the glory of PBR! You get what you should get. If you dedicated a reflection probe to the trees, plants sitting on the rocks at high elevations of Forgotten Ravine than they would get that same blue look because they are above the canopy and will get the blue of the sky reflecting off the leaves.

Which screenshot? The sunshafts included in the demo, screenshots, and free to use pack in the first post of this thread is True Volumetric Lights from @Michal_ . Is setup with the TFP 1.1 Extra folders Directional Light. Also has a script that has to be applied to the camera you are using.

Cheers

 

Thank you very much for the information, that was really helpful, and I learnt something.
Regarding the "shafts" I was talking about these bright areas in the coconuttree leaves.
I've circled some of them in red:


I can even see them in the scene view, so I don't think that it's the Volumetric Fog, right?

 

Good to hear man! Those are not sun shafts. Not sure what you are seeing but I just see the very aliased palm branch texture.

You are correct the volumetric lighting is only in game mode but I thought you were talking about another screenshot.

 

I mean these lights encircled in yellow on the right side in comparison to the same material encircled in green on the left side
:
Can you tell me why the left side appears dark and the right side appears very illuminated?
That's why I thought you were using Sun Shafts.

 

Hi @Jemika,

Have this issue noted in the main post of the thread. It is caused by using a version of Unity before 5.6.3 when importing the pack. If you open it is Unity 5.6.3 or anything newer you can import the 1.1 update and use that unitypackage in an older version of Unity if you want. It is just a Unity and Asset Store issue.

Hey @hermie, This is just light and shadowing from the directional light.

 

I'm just trying to replace the CTI custom shaders with Lux Plus shaders. Lars said that this would work, however I don't get it right. It's the last post in the Lux thread:
May I ask you if you habe perhaps experienced something similar already and see what might cause my problem?

Edit: I'm on a mobile right now, so I can't paste links, sorry. Also, Lars offered me to have a look at a stripped down project. I'm trying to prepare one since 2 days. Anyways, if you should spot anything obvious from my screenshots in the lux thread, please just tell me.
Thank you.

 

No I have not had a chance to use Lux Plus yet. I will take a look and see if there is anything simple causing this but it might just be something small on your end that could mess everything up. Happens to me A LOT! Really annoying. Stepping back and retrying with something simple is a good next step. Get a small project together with just a palm and fern and try to get it working. If it does not then send it to Lars to look over like he said on the last post. Let me know how it goes and I will message if I find anything.

Cheers

 

Thank you very much for the help in advance, and also for telling me that it happens to you as well, that's a great motivation, really.
My lighting question was related to the demo scene that I'm preparing.

 

I have one question, if you may: How did you create these beautiful plant textures? Did you put them under a scanner? Or are they photographs? If they are photographs, you must be the master of lighting.

 

Most of the plant textures were photographed and stitched. I do have plans to build a scanner similar to Megascans but just sticking to lightpad and DSRL for now. Lighting is tricky but biggest problem was getting decent ambient lighting and not corrupt the background blue screen with something like the palm and banana branches. They were very tricky to get right. Especially since some were 2-3 meters long.

By the way I actually recorded the tutorial for CMU v3 today but have a bit of a cold and after half an hour of recording listened to it and realized I sound like a dying duck . So I have the script and know the process well now. When I get rid of the cold I will record it again.

 

So you illuminate with a LightPad as the sole light source?
In any case, your lighting is AWESOME. The plants in this pack have just an outstanding quality.

 

Thanks man! No all in this pack were shot outside on a cloudy day on a blue sheet. I am now using the lightpad for cleaner masking and translucency gather. Trouble with using a lightpad, and main reason I did not for TFP, is the size. Without a custom build it is hard getting one larger than 20 inches and tropical leaves tend to be much larger.

 

But your plants look perfectly smooth / flat. I was wondering if you put them behind glasses and pressed them. You just photographed them??

 

As a side-note to all possible buyers I wanted to say that this asset along with the tutorial video will show you how to make excellent scenes. The knowledge you gain from buying and supporting the author's work is worth soooooo much.
It will really boost your Unity skills. So much to learn from!
Thank you again.

 

Thank you again man! Really appreciate the support.

Not all no. I just had to use a higher f-stop for some like the palm, banana. I did flatten some as much as I could without breaking the leaves, branches. Like putting books over the palm fronds for an hour and then shooting. Then cutting parts that just will not stay down. Also you can always do some cleaning in PS when masking. If a palm leaf is just up a little and out of focus just clean it out. It is actually not bad when you get the hang of it. Just very time consuming.

For my future work I am going to focus on shooting smaller and then modeling the larger parts together for baking. It is much more efficient and gives better results.

 

This pack looks amazing. I'm interested in purchasing, but concerned with performance and compatibility issues. How does performance compare with standard Unity trees and with SpeedTree trees? And are there potential compatibility concerns with console systems? Any special shader requirements, etc.? I would be using Forward rendering on Wii U console.

[EDIT]
Also, will most likely be using with Vegetation Studio at some point.

 

Hi @magique,

Performance is much better than SpeedTree but probably less optimized than your average Tree Creator trees. These are instanced and instancing does definitely help a lot when it comes to making forest. What I would say for performance testing is test the demo scene and see how it works for you. Both demo scenes are quite dense using traditional gameobjects and terrain tree placement. Also image effects. They should both have FPS counters, let me know if they do not because the local build I have does not.

I am not sure of compatibility with consoles. @larsbertram1 would know more about that. Know the Wii U is not a powerful system so can not put much faith in TFP performing well on it. Also do not belive it supports modern APIs so not sure about instancing support.

There should be full support with VS soon and that will help a lot with making a large forest. Again though not sure about instancing support on Wii U and think VS relies on instancing.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

 

VS uses instancing, but does not require it. But Wii U does not as yet have instancing and might never. Does this require instancing?

 

I would say with any detailed forest scene instancing would be required. Especially if you need good performance. In VS it is optional but I believe a majority of its benefit is through the use of instancing.

What it comes down to is how do you want to use this pack? Like in the demo scenes and very dense or with sparse coverage and mostly simple quad grass? Would say if used for a sparse forest with good optimizations to the scene it would work fine but if wanted denser like the demo scenes than you will not get it playable on a Wii U.

Also for any older gen console the textures resolution would have to be dropped to save VRAM.

 

Sometimes the Wii U can do more than people might think. But, it all depends on what performance I could get will determine how dense. I've done some pretty dense scenes on Wii U with tree creator trees so you never know. Especially with the benefits of VS to improve things.

As long as instancing is not required then I'd be willing to give it a try.

 

That will be awesome if it could work well! Yeah think it would definitely be a matter of getting a balanced density. Yeah instancing is not required. There might also be some performance edits you can make to the shaders like disabling fades between LODs. Would cause more popping but think it would drop calls significantly. I will ask Lars about shader compatibility with the Wii U when he is available. Do not see why it would not work.

 

If it's like AFS then it should work because I've tested that on Wii U before.

 

Good! It is closer to AFS 5 so not sure if that is what you tested but even AFS 4 working is a good sign. If you do use it and have any issues than Lars and I will help of course.

 

I've tested AFS 5 on Wii U and it works.

 

Great! It should work then.

One thing though that I just remembered when testing emulations is that the shaders when used on the terrain can not be dynamically batched. So by default it is fine having them dynamically batched because instancing, well, instances them before they are batched so there is no problem. When instancing is disabled or you are using an API that does not support instancing you will notice plants bending extremely across the scene. I have not tested this with Vegetation Studio so not sure if this is a problem with it too. So if dynamic batching is important and you are using a non-instancing API than it probably will not work for you. Unless VS fixes this problem but waiting for full compatibility before testing this.

 

I am planning to use Microsplat terrain shader. As soon as I can help Jason figure out the Wii U issue with that. It worked in early beta, but broke later, but should be fixable.

 

Cool! Yeah I would not expect such a detailed project on a Wii U. You get all these systems working you are going to have the best Wii U project I have seen

Yeah so let me know if you have any more questions. For testing reasons what API is the Wii U currently utilizing?

 

I'm not sure what you mean. Are you asking about shade model?

 

Like OpenGL ES3, DirectX 9. Figure it is Shader Model 3?

 

It's proprietary, but uses Shader Model 4.

 

Thanks!

 

@Baldinoboy Is Lux part of this asset?

 

No it is not. Maps are fully compatible except for height maps. It is just a height map without the puddle information in I think the blue channel. Does work fine with Lux just lacks that extra info for puddles.

Also if you want to use Lux with the rocks you need to use a black texture for the height, with maybe the puddle info added if you want, because parallax just does not work with models. You can use tessellated displacement but there are still minor cracks where the UVs are on the rocks since there is no crackless displacement option.

 

Actually, that's good. I didn't want it to be dependent on Lux, but since Lars helped you and it's similar to AFS then I wanted to be sure.

 

I'm liking the look of your asset very much, my large project uses forward in the
Rendering Paths option, I read/heard you talking about changing to deferred. Will this interfere with my project/existing objects/shaders?

 

Hi @khos,

You do not have to use Tropical Forest Pack in Deferred. It is a bit better with performance but still works fine in Forward. As long as you are modest with lights of course. If you are not going to use Deferred there is no need to input the CTI-Internal Deferred shaders. It will just work in Forward.

Now if you wanted to switch to Deferred you need to input those Deferred shaders in the Graphics menu and it should be compatible with anything else. Would definitely work with any Standard or Custom Shaders that do not require their own Deferred method.