Assets [WIP] Hazy Hills - Temperate Coniferous Forest Environment

Now that it is nearing its completion, we are glad to announce our upcoming product for the asset store- Hazy Hills, a temperate forest environment inspired by woodlands of Central and Northern Europe.

Our aim with this environment is to bring contemporary asset authoring techniques to Unity, providing the level of fidelity expected of high end applications in 2019 while at the same time forgoing the employment of photogrammetry in order to maximize the versatility of our assets and maintain a more consistent art style suitable for use in both realistic and fictional scenarios.

As of now, the asset consists of 14 Spruce trees of sizes ranging between saplings to mature 130 foot tall giants, over 25 ground cover plants, ferns and clovers, roots, ground decals, dead foliage, debris and 12 terrain tiles.
All, of course, fully optimized with lods, billboards and accompanied by foliage shaders offering full functionality in Unity versions 5 through 2019, in standard, universal as well as HD rendering pipelines (HDRP builds out of preview, 2019.3 and above).

The full release containing additional features as well as two demo scenes (standard + HDRP) are expected to arrive on the asset store later this month.

For now, enjoy a sneak peek at the finished art and some work in progress imagery, and feel free to share any input, impressions, thoughts, suggestions or even demands.

Thank You!

Finished Assets:



HDRP shader previews and performance tests (targeting 60+fps in HDRP on desktop on entry level hardware):

 

Current Work-In-Progress:

6 of the 12 included tilesets, rendered in Marmoset Toolbag with full features.


Testing terrain tessellation performance in HDRP-


Testing grass terrain shaders in HDRP-


Testing two of the three included terrain grass types in standard (Unity 2017.1)-


Testing ground decals and tree bark tessellation in standard (Unity 2017.1)-

 

Amazing stuff, looks better than most artsy assets on the store and I'm not a big fan of photo-scans either. As a matter of fact the best looking assets are just photo-scans and I find i really sad that not a lot of people can manage to make them look just as good from hard work alone.

 

Thanks for the input!
There are great many merits to employing photosourcing in asset creation, we have however decided in favor of traditional workflows for the sake of making it easier to maintain a unified artstyle across our future products.

And we would also like to announce that our pack is now, after some delays, complete!
Below you can see a few quick and dirty previews of the included scene that is currently being worked on.
You can expect to see Hazy Hills on the asset store later this month or in Early march, depending on the length of the approval process.

Hazy Hills in Unity Standard RP (2017.1 build) and the latest HDRP (2019.3 build).

 

Those last few images are gorgeous! Can't wait to try out HDRP myself, I didn't have the chance to do that yet.

 

The HD rendering pipeline is indeed great, but the standard rp can surely hold its own!

 

Looks great, are you planning to support vegetation studio/vegetation studio pro?

 

As in pre-defined biomes for Vegetation Studio?
Yes, we will try to include some, if not with the 1.0 release, then with the following update.

A comparison of the two rendering pipelines (HDRP, Standard) using comparable post processing settings.

 

Some more progress with the scene.

 

And the remaining asset showcase.

 

And here is a preview of the foliage shaders in HDRP that I finished up today.
The standard package will come with Custom Tree Importer shaders, but due to the rocky update history of UWRP and HDRP, we are also including some shader graph shaders for greater version compatibility.

Edit: Removed for the sake of cleanup, see the newer posts in this thread

 

Thanks everyone who checked out the project!
It's finally complete!

Standard Preview[2017.1]:

HDRP Preview[2018.3+]:

 

Looks absolutely amazing!!!

 

I agree, from an art standpoint, it looks good. Too many people over-rely on photo scans too often. I'm excited to see this on the store!

 

Haha! I'm kinda one of those people! My art talent on a scale from 1 - 10 for art is probably a -1
The best I can really do is low poly! I guess art just isnt my talent! But it sure is yours!

 

Thank you all for the input!

The package is now on the asset store!
assetstore. unity.com/packages/3d/environments/landscapes/hazy-hills-conifer-forest-165626

If you are an artist yourself and interested in the techniques I've used, you can visit my ArtStation profile for a closer look.
Many of the techniques I've written about have been employed in the making of this project.

You can also see some materials featured from this project in my posts.

ArtStation:
artstation. com/ivan_janik

 

Awesome, congratulations!!
I was looking at the screenshots again and I have to admit, I can use the mas reference, they look very good.

 

Thank you!

For those directed here from the store page.
You can look at the included manual for full overview of the package and its features.
▼

 

Big thanks to @florianalexandru05 for trying out Hazy Hills, and giving us a lesson on how Unity scene lighting and post processing is actually done, in Unity Standard RP no less!

Re-light, courtesy of @florianalexandru05:

 

Glad I could try it out, it's really high quality. I didn't expect the ground tiles to be so detailed first. The pine leaves are close to perfect while the small flowers and plants add the cherry on top. It was fun to try out some experimental lighting in this pack, it was just perfect for this. Now I got to improve my lighting rendering a little bit more. I'm sure I could have done a bit better but this is what I come up with within a short amount of time.

Congratulations on getting it approved! Good luck with your next work!

 

So this uses CTI for trees, right? What shader does it use for grasses? And for the dead logs?

 

The standard package uses CTI shaders for trees and all foliage, yes.
The HDRP (and soon the LWRP/URP) package uses my custom, shader graph-based shaders for foliage and trees.
I posted a video some while ago, but I guess it fell victim to my Youtube cleanup.

The HDRP shaders are slightly faster than CTI, (about 10% faster) but do not have certain features such as branch bending.
The grass in the standard package uses CTI shaders, but most features other than edge flutter are disabled.

I haven't experienced any issues using CTI for grass in Standard RP Unity 2017+ through 2019, but I may add a custom shader if people would prefer it.

 

I went ahead and dropped a ppsv2 profile preset sample in the standard package as well, since it is pretty much interchangeable with the HD rp 2018.x post processing anyway, just to show that the materials of the two rendering pipelines are more or less identical out of the box.



I also acknowledge that the current offering of rocks is limited to smaller boulders, so I will be adding procedural material shaders for larger rock formations.

With these, you will essentially be able to create cliffs of any scale, using either the rock meshes already supplied in the package, or any rock meshes that you have at your disposal- which will then be wrapped using Hazy Hills rock and moss textures, if you so desire, to match the aesthetic of the environment.

Just a quick and dirty example of what I mean:


These features will be added together with Vegetation Studio support in the next update.

 

So far there haven't been any issues with Vegetation Studio implementation, but we would like to make some tests on different machines for compatibility and performance, just in case.

If anyone with either Vegetation Studio or VS Pro would like to help in that regard, and test the package in the process, just drop a message in my inbox.
Thanks!

 

It looks amazing. I will use it. That's what I needed.

 

Great!
Let us know about what your experience setting up the project was like (whichever issues or inconveniences you rant into), and whatever it is that you would like to see added or changed!

I'm currently looking into expanding the project with more variations of coniferous trees- namely those found in primeval and sub-Alpine biomes, which will also see the addition of large rock formations.

 

EDIT: I feel like the biggest idiot. I just found your very helpful manual in the readme. Thanks heaps.

Thanks for making this great asset pack. I'm a little stuck though. Any idea why all the billboards are coming up like this? I'm probably making a newbie mistake, but I'm going around in circles trying to resolve this.

 

Hah! Hopefully you will find the answer for your issue there.
If you still end up running into any issues that you won't be able to figure out on your own, feel free to join our Discord channel at: https://discord.gg/dbGUsRM , or send me a message here on the forum.

Adjustments for better compatibility have been made for Unity 2019.3.7f+ and 2020.2.0a but they aren't yet included in the package on the asset store, they will go live in the upcoming content update.

 

I'd like to thank all those who have checked out Hazy Hills so far, and I would also like to announce upcoming changes that we have been working over the past few weeks.

These include dedicated shader suite controlled by global volume controller which will be replacing the current included shaders (CTI/Shader graph)

These will be available identically across Built-in, URP as well as HDRP and support features such as global wind, snow, moss and rain, as well as simulated light scattering (including in Built-in deferred and URP, without shader dependencies).
The full-feature GPU foliage and grass shaders also support features such as wind direction, distance fading and color variation.

For more information and eventual ETA announcements you can join our Discord channel at: https://discord.com/invite/qDEGxcw

Demonstrations of the upcoming shaders (in Built-in renderer):

The new tree shaders:

Global Controller in action:

The GPU instanced grass shader at 60fps, with 2.5 mil tris and regular directional light shadows.

 

So this works with Vegetation Studio Pro, right? Any chance of adding dynamic snow?

 

Both dynamic rain and snow are already being worked on, yes (and will be implemented using easily scriptable global shader variables).


The assets in the current version on the store would work with Vegetation Studio in HDRP, yes.
But I would advise to wait for now until the update is live (hopefully by next month) since it will contain new shaders tested in newer version of Unity with Vegetation Studio, Nature Rendered, GPU Instancer and URP support, among other things.

 

Great! So will rain and snow only be supported in the new version with your own shaders? (I'm already using CTI with some other trees, would prefer to keep them all on the same shader.) (And I'm using the built-in pipeline, not HDRP.)

 

Are you presently using any third party solution for global snow? (e.g. Vegetation Studio snow)
If so then the assets in this package should work just fine in all that works with your existing CTI assets, since they are exported and modified using CTI, but I would make sure to test it first.

Our custom shaders work with the same meshes, they simply ignore the CTI tags, so in any case they would be interchangeable.