3D [RELEASED] Winter Forest Environment

The pack is now available here: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/winter-forest-environment-138452

Update 1.1 (15.05.19) - Vegetation Studio Pro support

This update brings VSP support (for Unity 2018.2.11 or newer) with dynamic snow coverage, non-snowy variants of trees and better vertex normals and lighting for the tree models!



Features:
➤ 29 tree models: 7 birches, 8 spruces, 9 pines, 2 generic decidous trees and 3 large bushes with snow and no snow variants
➤ separate tree prefabs optimized for Vegetation Studio Pro with support for indirect instancing and dynamic snow coverage
➤ 27 small ground coverage plants
➤ 17 decor models such as branches, fallen logs sticks, tree stumps with snowy variants
➤ 4 rocks, 7 soil banks, 2 snow mounds
➤ a rustic village set including 4 houses, 2 shacks, barn, smithy, firewood pile, fences
➤ particle effects for snow, smoke and fog
➤ 8 terrain textures with 6 heightmaps for advanced blending and tessellation







Original post:

Spoiler

Hey!
Let me present you my current project I'm working on - Realistic Winter Environment!

With help of Custom Tree Importer (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/modeling/custom-tree-importer-21079) and photogrammetry I was able to achieve some really high quality tree models.
There is still a lot of work ahead so I have no ETA at the moment. Currently I'm working on rock models and completely reworking spruce trees. There are also few more photoscanned meshes coming as well as some medieval village houses and props.

Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions regarding the package!

 

Finished the rocks and reworked spruce trees along with a few other things. There are 4 rock models with still one more coming. Each rock is photoscanned and is a full 360 model, so it can be rotated in any direction which allows for huge amount of variety.

 

Nice style

 

Hey,

It's time for a small update.
I've finally finished all photoscanned forest decor models for the pack:




Also I've decided to add a few architecture models as well:



If you have any suggestions or questions regarding the pack, let me know!

 

Looks really nice. The big mointains in the background are mehes I suppose?
The rocks look really awesome. I love the hard edges.

The houses look also very good. Hope they come with interiors.
Vegetation Studio support would also by nice when released.

Cheers
Ronny

 

Glad you like it!
Yes, the background mountains is just a mesh. Vegatation Studio and Gaia support is definitely something I want. As for the houses, unfortunately interiors are not planned, at least for the release.

 

Well an update (included or seperated) for the interiors after release would be pretty cool. Because it's always really hard to find interior assets which suits the the exterior style on the asset store.

For the beginning double sided House walls, roofs and a floor prefab should be fine. So the houses are only empty inside and you only need to add props and stuff. Perhaps that would be a good idea for giving the people a fast way to fill the houses with life by themselfes.

Really looking forward to more pictures and the release.

Cheers
Ronny

 

looks awesome, greate work when you think is the release date?

Greetz Reiner

 

Current plan is January 2019, but everything's a subject to change so it's not a concrete date.

 

Hi!
I'm almost done with the pack! I just have to finish up the documentation and record a video. Here's a small tease.

 

Cool when you think it´s on (video and packed)

 

Video will be out either today or tomorrow. I'll probably send the pack into review this week. From there, it all depends on Unity, whether and when the pack is one the asset store.

 

I'm working on photogrammetry too. Deserts, since I live near Moab.

I really love your work. Fantastic! I'd love to talk shop sometime about work flow etc.

 

The package has been sent into review and the video is up!

@Automoda Glad you like it! Go ahead if you have any technical questions, PM me and I'll answer when I have the time

 

Great stuff Fer00m, how much will it cost?

 

The pack is now out on the asset store under the name Winter Forest Environment, priced at 65$! https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/winter-forest-environment-138452
Official Vegetation Studio support will come in a future update with prefabs etc.

 

Beautiful! Looks like top notch stuff and IMO like a big step up from your previous nature pack. I especially like the overcast ambience. Do most of the assets come with baked in snow or is that handled through a shader?

 

link doesn't work

 

@christoph_r
Glad you like it!
All decor meshes (branches, tree stumps etc.) and architecture has shader-based snow from the custom shader I included. Shader was created with Amplify Shader editor. The snow can be modified with parameters or completely removed. Tree branches however have the snow within the texture. I'm considering adding non-snow versions in a future update though!

@gecko
Thanks for the heads-up, I think it should work now!

 

Looks great! So VSP now (with the v1.1 coming out today or tomorrow) supports dynamic snow on CTI trees -- will your package use that, or is it a different method?

 

Looks really beautiful!

 

@gecko
I only own the standard version of Vegetation Studio, so I'm not very familiar with Pro features. I am however about to purchase it! All that can be seen on the video and screenshots is made purely with Unity and CTI.

@kristiangrundstrom
Thank you!

 

Great -- and it you decide to tackle that, ask Lars if you need his updated shaders for CTI snow (not sure if he's updated the CTI package yet).

 

Hey,

I'm currently working on an update which adds Vegetation Studio Pro support! It will include new CTI shaders which support instanced indirect as well as dynamic snow. Tessellation shader doesn't have these two features so I'll be creating seperate tree prefabs for both indirect instancing + snow or regular instancing + tessellation.

Here are some screenshots from two biomes I've got, all 100% generated with Vegetation Studio:

 

Dear fer00m, amazing work beautiful thank you very much
Any plans for a update with more buildings in this asset?

And any plans for other biom or climatic zones in the futur ?

for example tropical forest, savanna/desert, temperate deciduous forest/grassland, taiga or mountain zone ?

 

Looks great!

 

@SickaGamer Thanks!
@Twoonebe
Since I rely on photogrammetry a lot for environment work I think tropical and desert environments are off the table for now. I'd love to create an old decidous forest pack inspired by Fangorn forest from LotR, but I probably won't start working on this until the new terrain system and HDRP is fully fleshed out.

No plans for more buildings at this time, but this might change. For now I have more vegetation content planned.

 

Looks awesome, but something about the red hue on the scanned wood stands out, my personal uncanny valley filter... tell the delighting to dial down the red a bit.

 

Hi,
Just a small update: I'm still working on next update which includes VPS support. The reason for the delay is that I'm also reworking vertex normals on most of the trees to achieve much, much better and accurate lighting. It's something I wanted to be done from the start, but I was unable to get it working before launching the pack. Here's an example:



Also as you can see, I'll be adding branch textures without snow in them, so you'll be able to use the trees in non-winter scenes as well.

 

Hey!
I'm done with creating custom vertex normals and non-snow variants. All that is left to do are last Vegetation Studio tests. I think it's safe to say that I'll submit the update this month. Creating the new vertex normals also resulted in much better lit billboards! Here's a small test of new non-winter spruce and pine prefabs:



Also, dynamic snow on trees is working great and I will showcase it a bit later, when I submit the update.

 

Hi!
The update is now out! It includes Vegetation Studio Pro support, dynamic snow coverage ( VSP required) and non-winter tree variants. Here's a preview of the dynamic snow coverage:



Also, for 2 weeks only, the pack is now 45% off!

For the future updates I hope to remake the spruce trees completely from scratch (and later on, pines, but only the branch parts). I'm not too happy with how they turned out and I hope to bring it up to par with Book of the Dead quality. I'm currently gathering materials for new branch textures:



Current spruce branch texture is actually made from a fir tree branches I had for the christmass tree. New one will be from actual common spruce, as seen above. I will also make new scans of spruce bottom trunk and bark textures as soon as weather allows. Currently it is either too sunny or too rainy.

That's all for now,
Cheers

 

Dear Fer00m, your pack is finish and looks realy nice i hope you put your force on other projects like a some enviroment from lord of the rings ?

 

@Fer00m package looks and runs great, especially with the new Vegetation Studio Pro profiles.

Any chance you'd bundle in the non-snow versions of the VSP profiles as well? I realize on my end it's a matter swapping out some of the objects (mostly the sticks and deadfall). However, for continuous import into future projects and all it would be nice if these profiles were packaged to save on time.

 

@local306 I will add a non-snow profiles in a next update. Hopefully with non-snow versions of small plants/grass etc.

 

Looks amazing!

A few questions though before I invest in it, how well can you integrate this with the Gaia/CTS/Enviro workflow? Are there any issues to be aware of? Can the dynamic snow coverage be combined with the weather system of enviro? What about the World Manager API that both Procedural Worlds and microsplat supports?

Again fantastic job, I always love a good winter environment.

 

Hi @andenybe

I did some quick tests in Gaia and tree models work without any issue. Small plants and grass, however, need to be added as trees instead of grass/detail objects, because they also use CTI shaders. So maybe you could create two separate Tree Spawners, one for actual trees, another for details, but I'm not sure how well suited Gaia is for spawning very dense tree objects.
CTS as far as I am aware is just a terrain shader for the default Unity terrain system? If that's the case then they shouldn't conflict at all.

As for Enviro and dynamic snow - keep in mind that the dynamic snow coverage is something that works only when using Vegetation Studio Pro, so I assume it depends how well VSP and Enviro integrate. I don't own Enviro, so I can't check for myself at the moment (I plan to aquire it at some point, so maybe then I'll be able to give more detailed answer).

Lastly, regarding World Manager API - I'm completely unfamiliar with it and with coding side of things in general, so I can't comment on that unfortunately.

Best regards!

 

@andenybe Enviro (latest versions) and VSP have good integration for dynamic snow, we're using it with CTI trees quite nicely.

 

This is a really great pack -- and thanks so much for adding CTI snow, it's just fantastic to have.

One question, though, about Pine_06: at least in my project, the AO (?) seems too exaggerated, with the branch tips very bright and the lower branches and trunk quite dark. Is there something I can tweak to adjust that?

 

@gecko
I changed the texture a bit in 1.1 so there's more contrast between start and end of the branch. I will send you the older 'flat' version in a PM

 

Awesome, thank you!

 

Hello,

I want to give this asset a try, but I'm mostly interested in the houses, so can you tell me what is the size of the houses and their textures, also do they have a no-snow version? I'm talking about the "rustic village set including 4 houses, 2 shacks, barn, smithy, firewood pile, fences".

I see the whole package is 2.7GB, but last time I tried to upload something as large as this I got a lot of errors

 

forgive the dumb question...but how do I reduce the texture sizes in the texture array assets? (Also: they are 4096x4096, with two textures in them....does that mean each texture is 4096, or they are 2048 and so half of the 4096x4096 is unused?)

 

@gecko
That is a very good question! I don't think you can resize texture array itself like you'd do with textures. The array for spruce bark is 4k for each texture. For lower resolution, the texture array needs to be generated again with 2k textures. I can send you 2k array tomorrow.

@skinwalker
You can use the architecture models without snow, you'd simply need to change the material to Standard or turn off the snow in the custom snow shader. The architecture assets should be around 400MB, uncompressed.
Also just FYI, the houses feature no interiors.

 

Thanks!

Also, do you know if texture arrays obey Unity's Quality Settings for texture quality (size)?

 

I tried testing it in editor by setting the quality to the lowest, but the arrays were unaffected. Maybe in built version it'd be differend, but I doubt it. There is a "Downsize fallback" parameter in the arrays, but I don't know how it works.
I haven't worked with arrays before and I hadn't anticipated that texture arrays would have issue with resizing, but perhaps it could be solved with scripts.

 

I would like to have those 2k texture arrays too, if that's possible

 

@gavriloP
Sure, sent you a PM

 

Hi there Great pack! When hdrp/lwrp will be supported ?

 

Hey @PiterQ70, HDRP/LWRP is not planned unfortunately. This may change if CTI shaders receive HDRP support though.

 

Is there a way to make your Standard Snow shader work with Vegetation Studio Pro, like the snowy versions of the trees do? Would be super handy.