[NEW PATCH] uNature - GPU, Interactable Grass. Interactable Trees, MultiThreading and more!

Nope, sorry
Will keep you guys updated on when a fix will be pushed

 

Hey guys,

I've tried integrating uNature into my project and it has been working well so far. Yet, now I am facing the issue that some grass is not on the ground - as you can see in the attached screenshot, it happens across and only partially for specific chunks.

I've set the layer of the terrain to uNature_Terrain, and that is the only object in that layer. I've also changed the Maps Generation Mask to use only that layer, and in case it matters I've set the Render Layer for each prototype also to that layer.

I've tried regenerating the height maps from the button on the top of the Foliage manager, and I've tried to generate them from the chunk settings for the affected chunks. Removing the grass and painting it again gives me the same result.

Changing the terrain height in the affected areas makes me think this is a height offset problem, as the grass height is updated accordingly - but still the same height above the terrain.

Is there anything else I could try to solve this problem?

Thank you,
Best regards,
Patrick

 

Hey!
That is rather strange, could you take a cube, place it on the ground and see what the height is? (if its < 0 you will need to reduce the height of the foliage manager so it supports lower heights)

But if not, then please contact me in pm with your skype and I will do my best to help you

 

Hey Elroy,

thank you for your fast reply. Your hunch was right, the height of the in that position was the only part of the whole terrain that was below 0 in world coordinates.
I elevated everything by 50, just to be on the safe side. It now works as expected

Thank you,
Best regards,
Patrick

 

Happy to hear it works

 

Hey guys!

As you probably noticed I have been very quiet recently. Been thinking about where I want to advance with uNature and came up with some really interesting stuff.

I am currently planning out the milestones and creating a game plan for the future of uNature and I got to admit, It looks very very promising. I hope to re-work a lot of the problematic parts like UI, ease of use, mechanics and overall some stuff that didn't look very good. for instance, sometimes there would be tiled patches, wind could use some improvement and also going to make it much easier to add compatibility to specific assets (especially the map magic issues you guys have been seeing)

Don't have much to show atm but I hope to start development soon once I wrap up the game plan.

Sorry for the wait, I promise it will be worth it!

 

Will you be able to add colliders to the tress?

 

Uhmm what do you mean?

 

Willl unature automatically add colliders to trees?

 

Well it already does, when you move around the trees, they will have colliders.

 

I can walk through the trees though. Thats why I ask.

 

Did you follow the instructions on setting it up on the documentation ? (UNTerrain etc)
Note that it doesnt generate it automatically, you will need to have some colliders on your prefab before generating the pool so uNature will have something to work with

 

Hello.

Is it possible to use the foliage manager of uNature with "World Streamer"? Is there a tutorial for it? Thanks.

 

Basically, World Streamer adds scenes additively and it also changes the position of terrains. So if a terrain in scene A is at (100,0,100) and another terrain in scene B is at (150,0,0). What it does is, it loads both of the scenes and then moves the terrain #1 from 100,0,0 to 0,0,0 and also terrain #2 from 150,0,0 to 50,0,0. You see what I mean? I'd be glad if you say it is possible to use it with WorldStreamer or not.

 

It is possible technically but you have to set up the grass in one scene (When all of the terrains are connected)
I hope to bring a better solution in the next versions.

 

But what if the scene gets "unloaded" or even not loaded at all? I mean, assume that we have 4 terrains each of them is in an individual scene. So we have 4 scenes and each scene has one terrain.

Now if I load a scene and add a foilage manager to it, then how other scenes could always access the data of that scene? I don't get it.

The other thing is, I can't understand how uNature work. it would be helpful if you describe the mechanics of uNature OR if you use WorldStreamer yourself and test it.

 

Basically it doesn't really matter whether they unload or not. The way the integration works is that there's one foliage manager in the main scene and on EDIT time you have to put all of the terrains together and make sure you copy foliage from all of them. It's a bit annoying, but thats the way it works for now (will be changed in the future)

"The other thing is, I can't understand how uNature work. it would be helpful if you describe the mechanics of uNature OR if you use WorldStreamer yourself and test it."

They are described on the store page , but shortly -> gpu based grass mechanics (fully independent of unity's terrain) and have a lot of performance features like LODs, etc.

And also another part which is the trees. Note that its using the terrain trees and its not like the grass solution. its just there to allow you to interact with individual terrain trees.

 

Hi, good to know a new version of uNature is under development, but what about the support for MapMagic? The grass system always warn me about the missing materials and the tree colliders can not follow the player to update from time to time. Any fix on these in the new update?

 

Yep absolutely, I am remaking some of the systems so it will be much well architectured and less buggier. It will also allow me to support map magic on the fly.

Some of the changes (Early early ones) were already pushed to the repository, like the new maps manager that I implemented. But a lot more changes are coming!

 

Great! Will just wait for the next update! Keep the good working.

 

Cheers!

 

Any progress with MapMagic integration

 

Hey - Check @Harekelas post above

 

I was just kinda naggin ya ;p
The last repository push was over a month ago =o

 

Heheh np
Yea kind of experimenting with uNature atm and setting up a gameplan like I wrote above, mainly playing with some ideas and where I want to continue with uNature and so far it looks really good.

Will start pushing changes once I start developing the new features, just making sure i have it all planned first

 

Good Morning,

any way to use a single material for multiple prototypes?

 

Hey!
Uhm same material? that's actually interesting, so basically using an atlas texture?
You can use an atlas texture, but using the same material is an interesting concept. Although I don't think it will work well as each material holds a different density map and certain stats like LODs, noise, etc

 

Yes, my idea was to assign the same material on all protoypes using the same settings to save some resources.

 

Probably won't save too much, but I will give it a shot in the next few days and let you know if It actually has any significant effect

 

Ok, thanks

 

Hello Patrick,

i have the same problem. How did you change the height ?

 

Basically the easiest way would be to select the foliage manager object in the scene, lift it by at least 300 units and then click "Update Heights" on the foliage manager.

OR

Lift your whole environment until all of the spots on the terrain are above zero.


I would suggest the first option, but both are fine

 

At the end I did it in the same way as Elroy suggested - taking the Foliage Manager Game Object and changing it's height

 

uNature is now on a 24 hour sale for $35!

 

Sorry, but I see no reason to buy asset that has problems and not ready for production.
When next version shall be released I may think about it, but not now for sure.

 

Sure, I fully understand
Will keep you updated when the new version is out.

 

Hello, I am considering buying this asset though havent seen anything mentioned for VR in a while. Does anyone have any screenshots or metrics to see the performance impact this has on VR and what you can achieve?

Thank You For Your Time

 

Hey I owe both oculus and vive and used it on my last project,
If you can remind me tomorrow hopefully I will be on my office and get you a screenshot

 

Hi, Elroy!
May I ask when will the next version of uNature come out?
And can I use uNature along with advanced foliage shader 5?

 

Hey!

"May I ask when will the next version of uNature come out?"
No ETA at the moment but almost done with the game plan and hope to start development in the next 2-3 days. Once I start development it should take 2-3 weeks to finalize and to be pushed into the repository

"And can I use uNature along with advanced foliage shader 5?"
Well it's two completely different systems in terms of functionality, so integrating them probably won't be worth the effort. The author is really an amazing guy and It can be integrated, just not out of the box

 

If there can be a function to allow me only use the interactive tree feature and block the grass part, it would be more flexible for us to choose which feature we use.

 

Oh that's possible, simply disable grass on the UNSeeker

 

just putting a reminder for some performance metrics . not sure your time zone so this could be during work hours or when your asleep

 

Will have a chance to check it out soon and let you know!

 

Hi Elroy,
I need your help with fixing the bug (or some kind of issue) that I've just faced. So, when I run scene in editor everything is ok, but things are getting bad when I run builded version of my project. I'm having a memory leak for about 60 Mb/sec and I definetly sure that it causes by your uNature grass, because when I turning your component off - the leaking stops I tried to turn off shadow casting, instancing, fade distance, but only disabling of whole component helps. If it could be important - I have 6 large terrains and 4 types of grass.
In "output_log.txt" I'm getting the repeating message:

Internal: JobTempAlloc has allocations that are more than 4 frames old - this is not allowed and likely a leak
(Filename: Line: 371)​

I'll be very thankful if you help me in some way!

 

Hey -> Good find!
I will take a look most likely today/ tomorrow and let you know, if possible, could you try and see if it happens also on a new project?

 

Yes, of course! I'll try to reproduce it in some way. I'm building for Windows x86_64 using Unity2017.1 (same trouble still was on 5.6).
Thank you for reply c:

And also, did you ever see this error (JobTempAlloc)? I've read a bunch of threads about this trouble and noone gave any kind of working solution :c
This error even posted on issue tracker (https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/is...ne-build-output-log-if-trees-are-in-the-scene), but marked as "fixed" - strange huh?

 

Hehe cheers!
And to be honest nope, I am actually using 5.6.0f3 for a project I am working on with uNature (quite a huge project) and didn't notice any memory leaks. But I will research this further, maybe there's a certain feature that causes it!

 

Hi Elroy,
I figured out what caused the memory leak. You can reproduce this leak by adding to cameras to the scene, both have USeeker component. Also, they should render to different displays. Memory leak happens in build version. Thank you for your support, hope I've helped you in some way

 

Oh! Interesting catch!
I will take a look hopefully today and let you know what I find!

Update: Sorry out of town this weekend, will check tomorrow (on monday)