What do you think about Speedtree system integrated with unity ?

If you take the time to adjust them yourself, and you are a coder, and you don't mind that they are weird colors, have floating leafs when randomized or do not match the rest of the PBR shaded world, then yeah, they are pretty cool.

 

They are great trees, just need a bit of polish - if we can get that done, I'll be using them everywhere

 

Man, a lot to talk about here.

If you wanted to randomize one of our trees in the modeler it is important to know what is being affected. If you pull any tree into the modeler and pay attention to the properties bar you can begin to see the number of variables that are being randomized. Within each property is a +/- that controls the degrees to which variance is applied during randomization. Paying close attention to these how these are set and to your curves will allow you to fine tune your results to greater success.

The properties of the tree are essentially a recipe and controlling the variables will determine the outcome. Adjusting these properties can help eliminate some of the need to touch up a tree after randomizing it. I'm working on putting together some documentation and tutorials that might be helpful. In the meantime keep in mind that there are many properties that can affect the shape of the tree, and sometimes there are more than one way to get to the same result. Exploring how the properties work and what they control is the best way to make better trees.

In regards to Sub Surface Scattering, it's something that we are looking into and is on our radar for the future. In the meantime, I have to say I've already seen some great looking scenes using SpeedTrees in Unity and can't wait to see what you guys build with it.

 

What about new shaders? You spent time answering me and I already know the answers. I feel bad that the other folks didn't get their response.

I will use Speedtree regardless, just takes a little more work than expected.

 

In regards to SSS being added to the shader, as I mentioned above, it's something that we are looking into.

 

i would rather do it in the vertex shader by adding:
IN.tangent *= float4(1,1,1, -1);
should be faster (per vertex instead of per pixel) and would be the "correct" way to handle wrong tangents i guess.

and:
OUT.Normal.y = -OUT.Normal.y; // add this line
would effect billboards too, would it not?

lars

 

Question is: How did such a glaring bug not get mopped up earlier, lol

 

Whatever works for you. Like I said, the final fix will be in the importer code.

 

http://www.speedtree.com/forum/showthread.php?3657-SpeedTree-gone

I am really disappointed about SpeedTree.

Their slogan "Why is SpeedTree more than a mesh?" turned out to be "SpeedTree is just a mesh".
They don't even maintain their forum.

I can get that cheaper anywhere else.
I don't know why Unity says it natively supports SpeedTree, but being a professional and budget-wise girl, I have decided to use MK4 assets instead for now.

Fact is:

1) SpeedTree does not have a SSS shader for Unity as it does have for UE.
2) SpeedTree has several of their forum questions left unanswered for over 2 weeks.

 

Sorry you're not happy with the assets you purchased! Hopefully you'll find a solution that fits your needs better.

It looks like you had some questions about what we mean by "Tuned", but first I just wanted to clarify a few points to help everyone better understand what's involved with SpeedTrees. When a lot of people think of SpeedTree they think of the Modeler, which is a tool that we provide for the modeling of procedurally generated foliage. SpeedTree is also the SDK and compiler which provides an the wind effects, LOD transitions, and optimizations and is integrated directly into the game engine. This is used to varying extents depending on the need of the studio. For instance, Ubisoft may have integrated only portions of our SDK for Far Cry 4 while CD Projekt Red did a more extensive full integration for The Witcher 3. You can find out more about our SDK and SpeedTree for Games here.

In the same manner, SpeedTree's SDK is integrated into UE4 and Unity which allows the engine to take advantage of some of these same features. Like Greg pointed out UE4 and Unity handle shaders differently which means that what works in UE4 doesn't necessarily work in Unity. We're looking into SSS for Unity trees.

In terms of what tuning involves, you'll notice that our assets have scaleable wind effects and built-in ambient occlusion which have been fine tuned during modeling to strike a balance between economy and realism. The wind effects have been scaled to three different levels which allows you to favor speed or accuracy depending on your requirements. If further adjustments are needed the trees can be opened up in the modeler for customization. Be sure to check our site for more information on what makes a SpeedTree more than just a mesh.

 

I don't understand what you said in section #1 of your post.

Thank you for your statement in section #2 which I would summarize as "We are working on a Unity SSS shader".

Don't talk about wind for now, please. The standard setting is buggy. Or have you changed that?

Although it does not like like that at all, I am big fan of anything that is new and better.
Your SpeedTrees look promising (that was the reason why I purchased them), but I only wish that its development would not halt and that it is being updated until the majority of us are happy.
When I saw your forum being left un-maintained I felt really stupid for having supported you.
I hope you understand this.

 

We take great pride in our support. Could you elaborate on where you are seeing unanswered posts on the SpeedTree forum? We'll try to correct it.

I'm a little baffled, though, because it seems to me we approach 99% of them having answers (additionally baffled because I am often one who answers there...).

 

Other questions are open, but I am only referring to my own right now.
Sorry to judge simple by the forum, but being a developer for like 15 years, I have put the rule on myself to judge on forums. For example, opsive (http://opsive.com/) is really crazy, he answers forum questions within one hour. This is what makes customers really happy!

 

Oh, I forgot to mark ""Tuned" trees on the Unity Asset Store" as a question being left unanswered.

 

I'm more concerned with Unity integrating more of speedtree's features, particularly with draw calls and speed. Looking forward to continual improvements as fully expected from a partnership between Unity and Speedtree. I would expect nothing less.

 

I mostly really love Speedtrees. They work great in my game and while I have had to tweak them a bit, I tweak everything.

I can live with the things I don't love at the moment..but I am concerned that the threads ignored above seem to focus on Unity user complaints and the lack of any substantial information on a shader update. I have bought a lot of trees and will probably continue to do so, but I hope that as Hippo said, we can expect improvements on Speedtree and I will add we expect communication to continue as well. I feel honestly as if we are a bother to you guys. I realize it isn't fun to hear criticism and sometimes we are are confused (I am sometimes confused ) but we wouldn't ask questions if we didn't really want to use the asset.

 

If you're even slightly confused with something like speedtree, then it needs addressing by them with clearer, more authoritative learning materials

 

LOL No, that was entirely my fault...well maybe. I confused smooth LOD's with the dithering that occurs when the first three LOD's fade into each other. I guess smooth LOD only means the fade from the last LOD to the billboard, unless I have that wrong.

I was justly corrected by Danny. I don't think I was the only one confused by that.

Otherwise, Speedtrees are easy to use and modify.

 

It's too bad there are so many complaints. SpeedTree has some pretty solid results for me so far, I've replaced many MK4 trees in various scenes and seen both a performance jump and improvements to visual quality.

MK4 nature assets are really high quality, but I think we all know that the future here is definitely SpeedTree.

The biggest problem I see long term is that asset store sellers probably can't resell SpeedTree models, which means that many people who rely heavily on the asset store will live in a kind of 'mixed mode' where they are using both SpeedTree and Unity trees.

I'm not sure how hard it would be to work out the legal issues here - but if that can be resolved and asset store vendors could resell SpeedTree models (with SpeedTree taking a cut) it would probably be in everyones best interest. Then we'd have the best of both worlds - with incredible artists like MK4 using excellent SpeedTree technology.

 

This is true. I find my performance is better with Speedtree as well, which is my big reason for using it. My only issue at the moment is that without decent shaders, the trees do not look like the belong in the scene.

 

Can anybody from SpeedTree give an estimation when the shader will be released?
Thank you!

 

Rust (Alloy) may be making some nice speedtree shaders before long - check their blog. Also I wonder if Unity's considered geometry instancing for large masses of trees? There's typically a lot of draw calls here with same tree with different params.

 

They said that they looking into it

 

I like that idea even better than Speedtree making them!

 

RUST, can you tell us more about it?

 

@Teila Do you think we should be prepared to set up the Rust shaders for all SpeedTree items ourselves? Although I like the idea of having a good shader, it seems somewhat laughable to me that we have to combine 2 products. But I guess SpeedTree would not purchase the shader.... Do you agree?

 

I don't mind setting it up myself. I set up the shaders from the forums and I set up Alloy shaders on all my other items. I don't care where they come from but I do trust Alloy to make some awesome shaders.

 

No shader yet? I will wait with my purchase until SpeedTree has release their own shaders. It does not matter to me if use Alloy as long as the look natural. Currently my SpeedTree assets look "alien".

 

The new shaders provided by Unity look great.

I am however having a problem with AO.
No matter if I use the Standard Unity AO or the SSAO Pro, I am getting these artifacts:

Is this Unity's fault or SpeedTree's fault?

 

What new shaders provided with Unity? Did they release shaders for Speedtree?

 

Yes, I think so. They are in the latest Unity release. I have not heard anything official about it, however.
I am under the impression that it looks muuuuch better now.

 

So, whose shaders are they, Unity or SpeedTree, and what about the artifacts above?

 

eh there no log about any new speedtree shaders. . . strange

 

I don't know. I guess Unity provides them because they integrated SpeedTree strongly (as they state).
These are just the shaders named "SpeedTree" that are used when I import the SpeedTree asset from the Unity Asset Store.

However, they were updated along with the Unity update, not in the SpeedTree asset itself.

You can reproduce the artifacts problem with any ambient occulsion effect, I think.

I would tend to think that it is a problem in Unity, not in SpeedTree.

 

Did you attach the project and give them a bug report?

 

Nope, I am too busy. I was just hoping they could reproduce it easily themselves.

 

IIRC they have already said almost 80-90% of reports are not real bugs but user errors, incompatibly situations or etc so I'm pretty sure they won't try random things from forum posts, especially when they contain a lot of "I think" and no case numbers

 

Can anybody confirm if SpeedTree now looks differently for them after upgrading Unity?

 

That doesn't look like an SSAO issue (directly) to me, you can clearly see the mesh blades for alpha cutout. It could be that SSAO is just exacerbating it...

It's a shader issue..

Also even before most of this happened, I managed to get speedtree looking fine even back in Beta. The main issues were the leaves are too saturated out the box, so I just popped open Photoshop on the leaf and bark textures and toned it down a bit.

Takes only a minute..

 

@ShadowK
I am having the same problem.
I would like to get a fix from SpeedTree so that it works out-of-the-box.
I don't want to scale-down assets, fix textures, re-rig models. It should just work.
My life-time is too short to deal with problems that other people have as well and that could be fixed for many users at the same time.

 

Sure, you pay for a product and you expect it to do what it's supposed to. All I was saying is, don't let it stop you from carrying on..

 

Any update on new shaders for speedtree?

 

I started noticing floating leaves with the Broadleaf Desktop Speedtree I'm using as well. Exactly the problem Teila was mentioning earlier in this thread. I see DannyOakes saying the solution is to adjust the LOD curves, but is this only available in the SpeedTree modeler, or are you talking about the standard LOD percentages we can adjust on the default prefab itself in Unity?

The trees look cool, but having floating branches that don't connect to limbs is pretty unsavory if you're going for a semi-realistic look. Throws off the whole immersion thing lol. Any chance this could be added as an exposed setting that the user could adjust to fix this issue in the future? I'd love to not have "floating branches". Thanks!

 

@Dannyoakes seems to have left the building. Could use him coming back to help out and answer a few questions; just improve him company's standing in the eyes of his customers.

 

btw. modeler now includes free bonus stuff each month,
http://blog.speedtree.com/2015/09/new-subscription-modeler-perks/

 

I love these trees, but there are little things that are being ignored. I think the Unity users are the red-headed step children.

 

You missed out "buck-toothed"

 

I don't think of you guys as buck-toothed, red-headed, or as step-children...but if I did I would love you as if you were my own. There is zero difference between the models we offer in Unity and UE4.

Sorry if you guys feel like I've been neglecting your questions, it's not intentional. (Before anyone asks, I do not have updates on the shaders, if I did, you would be the first to hear)

So, back to the floating branches... There are some floating branches in our free broadleaf desktop model. I pulled it open in our modeler to take a look to try and find the specific offenders you are pointing out and am having trouble finding them. If you shoot me a zoomed out picture of the tree it may give me a better idea.

But, I might have an idea as to what's causing them to be so offensive. It might be possible that from the perspective you are at now your model is already hitting one of the lower LODs, which of course, is going to reduce the branch size, and create more floating leaves.

You can adjust the LOD parameters inside of unity, so if you had a tree that is on the side of a path where the visibility is higher you could try setting the tree so that the it stays at LOD1 from a further distance.

So why do we have floating leaves in the first place? Simple: Economy. In this model there is actually a whole level of branches that are hidden. Even when these branches disappear BEFORE reaching the floating leaves you end up with an additional 2k triangles added to the tree. Some projects may be able to afford those extra couple thousand triangles, some may not. We don't expect our free assets to be a perfect fit for every project, just a starting point.

If you want to adjust the LOD curves of the branches you will need to go into the modeler and that is not something that we would be able to integrate into the unity side of things. However, our Modeler is only $19 dollars a month, now includes free trees plus a 15% discount (that stacks with other sales) in our store. It's really not that bad of a deal.

 

Thanks for the response, Danny. Most of my floating branches were created in the modeler so not sure that is a big help to be honest. If you could maybe write up a detailed list of things one can do in the modeler, I will follow it, and even post pictures to show that it works. Might help people who are considering the modeler. At this time, I can't recommend it to fix floating leaves.

However, I love the free trees and I love the modeler to make bushes and other plants. It is a great deal.

 

I think of myself as a red-headed, bucktoothed, stepchild because I am. However, you may pretend I am not since apparently there is something wrong with that.