What do you think about Speedtree system integrated with unity ?

There is nothing wrong with that!

 

Hey Telia! Are you still working on those river birch trees?

 

Question, sorry if it's been asked before. Are the textures for all Tree's PBR (or any of them)? I ask because if you look at the European White birch it looks very nice!. Some of them not so much.

 

I know, just giving you a hard time for an old colloquialism.

 

Hey Danny, thanks for the reply.

First of all, I have never thought of you as neglecting us, and I appreciate your Unity community involvement. I hope you continue to do so, as you have been. I know you can't be in the Unity forums 24/7 all day every day, and your amount of involvement has been very good so far, so thank you.

So, as for the floating branches, are these only implemented in a few of the SpeedTree models? For example, the free Broadleaf Desktop model -- is that the only one that has them (or one of a few)? Just wondering, because I'm perfectly fine with purchasing another model (say a pine-tree model) IF I can be certain they don't have floating branches as well. As you said, it has to do with the LOD's though, so I need to start learning more about this -- with the goal being to eliminate the floating branches in one way or another. I am using the LOD system right now, and I've spent some time tweaking the percentages and playing with settings in an attempt to eliminate the floating branches, but to no avail yet -- but it's only been with the free Broadleaf Desktop tree model so far.

I'm definitely not asking you guys to give out the modeler for free, no way, I'm okay with people making money for their work. But if I purchase a SpeedTree model, I do expect it to not have floating branches, or if it does, I expect to be able to correct that somehow, without having to "pay extra to eliminate floating branches" -- if you get what I'm saying. I can actually afford to purchase the modeler, but it's just one of those things where it's another system I'd have to learn, and time is money of course. Looks like it might be what's needed though to correct the problem.


What I've Tried:
So for the Broadleaf Desktop LOD's, I've tried constraining them to just the LOD0 level (the best quality level), and I still get floating branches. As I said above, I've tried adjusting the percentages to be LOD1 at a very near distance as well, and still get floating branches. I have not found an LOD percentage or level yet that eliminates them. My game involves flying around, and so trying to hide the floating branches at certain angles so that the player never sees them is virtually impossible. It's not like a "walk along the path" type of game where I can turn the trees so that the player never sees them type of thing.


Summarization:
Okay, all that being said, would you like me to give you a picture here on the forum, or would you like me to private message you pictures?

Sorry for the long post, but I really do like the SpeedTree trees, and I'd like to fix my issues with them if I can. If the purchasing the modeler is the best/easiest way of solving the "floating branch" problem, then "it is what it is". Sounds like you were alluding to this as being the case, but I'd like a little more re-assurance that this will fix the issue.

Also, please let me know if there are other trees that do not have the floating branches "internally" incorporated within the system already (I know you said it's the LOD reducing or eliminating some of the tree limbs themselves but I'm just saying floating branches because it's easier), if there are any?

 

I gave up, Danny. I tried asking here and on the forums and all I got was...use the modeler. No one cared enough to tell me what setting to use or how to do it. I was hoping that since you love us all equally that you would share that information, especially since it seems I am not the only one.

 

A number of the trees have floating branches. I have not found them with the pines though. This was especially bad after I took them into the modeler to generate random variations. Those had HUGE problems with floating branches.

If Danny shares how to fix this I do hope you will share it with the community. I don't rate I guess. LOL

 

lol, I'm sure you do Teila. And I'm sure he will too. If I learn how, I will let you know as well. It seems like one of those problems where people who are experienced with these systems (and the LOD system) see it as not being that big of a deal to fix. Whereas a person like myself, who has very little experience with LOD's, may have a bit of a learning curve with this.

At any rate, if I learn of a solution I'll let you know

Edit: If it's been awhile though and it seems like i may have forgotten, just send me a message.

 

Sorry for bringing that post back to life, but i am having an issue with my tree and can t find what s wrong :
The tree that i made from scratch will not be "randomized" when i paint it with the brush on the terrain. It does randomized properly inside speedtree though.
Everything on the bruish setting in unity is set to random, but the tree shape itself remans the same, as opposed to what they show in their video at unite...
Any pointers please ?

 

Are you expecting the tree to change shape in the Unity editor? You have to save out the individual randomized shapes from the modeler and then put them in the tree slots in Unity and paint them on like any other tree.

 

Telia's correct. You can randomize the geometry inside the Modeler, but you then have to export that model out to be able to import it into Unity. The SpeedTree Modeler

The "random" options inside of Unity have to do with the height of the tree (not the shape) and the rotation. Now if you Wanted to you could set the width to vary along with the height, which may give you some usable slightly different shapes, but generally I just leave "Width locked to height" checked.

Hope that helps!

 

I would like to one day, when fast HW/SW is much cheaper, create a virtual hike on one of the many trails in the national park nearby. Will Speedtree let me model trees, shrubs, and other plants to walk around and climb up or is it all billboarding?

 

"What do you think about Speedtree system integrated with unity ?"

I think it's a terrific idea!

However despite the fact they're rolling out version 5.4 of the engine, still no mention whatsoever that I've heard about them actually finishing the implementation they started over a year ago.

The whole point of Unity 5 was PBR PBR PBR and SpeedTree SpeedTree SpeedTree, did we mention you can use SpeedTree with unity natively now? Yet still to this day, SpeedTrees in unity 5 don't use PBR, and not only that they don't import in equipped to even handle transmission; A feature that Unity was capable of four years ago.

Many people including myself have asked SpeedTree about this and they're being as professional as they possibly can (which is admirable), responding only with variations of "Your trees are getting exported correctly to unity to utilize everything and if you want to know why they aren't using PBR or transmission inside Unity, unfortunately you need to ask Unity about that".

If you ask Unity however, you get zero response whatsoever.

You can tell by the tone of responses you get (From Speedtree) that, as professional as they're being, they went into this expecting that the superb quality of SpeedTree would be fully represented in Unity 5, but to this day Unity still hasn't held up their end of the bargain and SpeedTree trees in Unity only look half as good as they should, or for that matter, half as good as they do in Unreal.

Seriously, is there anyone in the world using Unity whom actually asked for a new LUT effect instead of fully-functional SpeedTree?

I'll sit patiently and await the first moderator who drops by to punish me simply for saying something that really needed to be, but no one else seemed to have the guts.

 

Why don't you cool your engines a bit? Why do you think we "target" you on every post (which we don't). I see no problem with your post. Critique of software is OK with me. I do it myself. I have my gripes with Unity but please stop your "oh the mods are going to punish me again" attitude. Keep it civilized and don't go overboard with rants and all will be fine.

As for the SpeedTree implementation, yes... Unity is still working on things but it is what it is. I am still waiting for Enlighten to be what it's supposed to be too. We're all waiting for fixes and better integration.

Thomas

 

Another speedtree issue...

HEre is the problem :


Simple terrain, with a sunlight , deferred rendering and HDR on cam.
What is that effect on the leaves ????? I get the all "Specular" idea.. but that's a bit intense... just no way my boss let me go with this on the environment...
Is there a correct version of the speedtree shader somewhere ???

PS: Downloaded the free speedtree package... does the exact same thing.. just in case it was my trees...

 

Yeh it doesnt have PBR support in any engine, but would it really matter much? Its not as if you are having metal or anything that shines in PBR shading on trees. Sure there is bit more details in roughness but its not that much to really complain about it.

 

I'll take improved performance over PBR any day.

 

quoted from: https://playrust.com/devblog-108/

Next on my list was to look into rendering and culling itself, which is a bit more complex than finding performance issues caused by our scripts. I found that the vast majority of our culling time was eaten up by trees, or their culling event callbacks to be exact. Turns out this was caused by the way Unity handles SpeedTree wind. Removing those wind animation handlers gave me a performance boost of around 7%, which is pretty decent for a single change. With this we ended up removing the last one of the SpeedTree features, so we’re pretty much at the same spot we were with Unity 4 trees now, just with a bunch of time wasted. It’s somewhat disheartening to see how horrible these things perform in Unity, especially considering that so many SpeedTree features are still missing from the engine entirely. We’re thinking it’ll be best to write most of these things ourselves, so in the case of wind we’ll add a custom wind solution to our tree shaders with no overhead on the CPU side.​

 

I never use wind. It's fake looking and kills performance.