[Old] Tropical Forest Pack

Tropical Forest Pack

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I am finally releasing my Tropical Forest Pack. It has been fun to work on.

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Many Thanks to Lars for the Custom Tree Importer, shaders, and help.

To Thomas Hourdel for the amazing SMAA which is a necessity for nature environments. Highly recommend you to download it and use it.

To AegonGames for Landscaper which has saved me many hours and is the one of the best Assets I have used.

To Eric2241 and SuperNewbee for testing and advice. Thanks guys.

Finally to the Unity team. Thank you very much for the Personal Edition of Unity 5. Lets Indie Asset Store Devs make better working products.

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The trees were modeled in Blender and imported into Unity using the Custom Tree Importer so they are shaded like Tree Creator trees and bend better since they have leaf tumbling.

Trees are setup to work with the terrain with capsule colliders setup. They also have an optimized mesh collider for the bark of each tree if you are placing them manually. When placing manually you can enable/disable the mesh/capsule collider.

Includes 12 modeled trees:

Banana_Tree01 - 1080 tris
Banana_Tree02 - 1092 tris
Banana_Tree03 - 1182 tris
Coconut_Palm_Tree01 - 2276 tris
Coconut_Palm_Tree02 - 2158 tris
Coconut_Palm_Tree03 - 1920 tris
Cupuacu_Tree01 - 6519 tris
Dwarf_Palmetto_Palm01 - 594 tris
Dwarf_Palmetto_Palm02 - 426 tris
Jatoba_Tree01 - 4210 tris
Kapok_Tree01 - 9470 - 12 tris (LOD0 - LOD5)
Papaya_Tree01 - 2750 tris

6 2048 ground textures. Each include the normal, height, and specular maps.

6 Grass Textures.

3 particle systems including:

Falling_Jatoba_Leaves
Falling_Papaya_Leaves
Ambient_Smoke

The Kapok Tree has a 6 LOD prefab. Due to its size and trunk shape you may want to place it manually. Better collision and controlled LOD states.

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Known issues:

If you have the Custom Tree Importer delete it from your project before importing Tropical Forest Pack! Will wipe the AO alpha vertex color. You can then import it back after importing Tropical Forest Pack.

If you are having conflicts with CTI-Camera-DepthNormalTexture contact me. It is a custom depthnormal shader for the tumbling shaders.

The Kapok Tree does not work with SSAO. It is something being caused by the model that I can not figure out. When I do find the issue I will fix it and upload an update.

Not an bug but a design issue. When manually placing do not set trees to static batching. Will screw up the bending. Definitely a major performance draw of Unity trees. The Kapok LOD prefab is setup and the LOD5 billboard is set to static batching. So that helps some.

Here are a few scenes you can download:

Tropical Forest Pack 1.0: Windows Mac

Tropical Forest Pack demo 1.0: Windows Mac

Tropical Forest Pack demo 1.0 only SMAA image effect: Windows Mac

Fix for Billboard Shader

Any Shader Forge shader compiled pre 5.3 will turn pink when using 5.3. I believe I currently only have one Shader Forge shader in Tropical Forest Pack which is for the billboards. @Acegikmo has already released a fix so I recompiled the shader. An update should be up soon to fix this but until then replace the TFP_Billboard shader with the one in the link below. Let me know if you have any problems.

TFP_Billboard_Shader



Store Page​

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Email: baldinoboy@gmail.com

 

Released!

Now live on the Asset Store! Use the Store Page link above.

To get the pack working better I removed the standard assets and the extra image effects like SMAA. Highly recommend you download SMAA and use it with this pack. Does a lot better with trees then the normal AA.

 

Fantastic pack. It looks amazing with image effects.

 

Thanks Eric! Nice shots

 

Any Shader Forge shader compiled pre 5.3 will turn pink when updating to 5.3. I believe I currently only have one Shader Forge shader in Tropical Forest Pack which is for the billboards. @Acegikmo has already released a fix so I recompiled the shader. Will probably take quite a while to get an update released so just replace the TFP_Billboard shader with the one attached. Let me know if you have any problems.

Thanks

Edit- Seems you can no longer attach files so here is the Dropbox link:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/99ikjbsb8cy39kp/TFP_Billboard.shader?dl=1

 

Have pretty much completely polished the new custom shaders that I will be using in the upcoming updates.

The tree creator shaders will still be setup but there will be the addition of trees with this new shader. The new shaders are completely physically based, and have variable color based on position. The bending is not as controlled as treecreator trees but the much better shading is worth it to me. There will still be the regular trees of course. The trees are also imported with a lightmappable UV2 with the bending information stored in UV3!

The trees, plants, and rocks will be in LOD prefabs using manually placement and the terrain LOD tree system. No more grass planes!

Here is the new shader in action.



The scene only contains the Jatoba and the new Fern plant. The billboarding is happening not far. The new billboard shader is also using the color variation so the mesh and billboards will be similar in color. Even the fern has 4 LODs and is billboarding. The terrain is using Realtime GI and the lightprobes are passing the lighting to the plants and trees. So dynamic lighting is now possible! Also height fog! No worrying about the billboard shader and its sorting issues.

I will be getting together a few plant models, hopefully some rocks, and setting up all the trees LODs for an update soon. Will update with any news.

Thanks

Edit- Excuse the black outline on the fern branches. Still a WIP so have not finalized the texture.

 

Wow congratulations Baldino Boy, great work, I love your assets and the new update appears to improve a lot.
Currently I am using it in a project challenging enough but the result is comforting, I look forward to trying the new update.

 

Thanks robymv! I will try getting the new shading and a few new plants out in an update soon. The rocks and wide assortment of ground cover will take a little longer though.

 

Since I am popping out a few plant models right now I wanted to ask if anyone wants a terrain detail mesh compatible import?

Will be a separate import category if requested. What I am making now is Custom Tree Importer plant models with my custom shader so they can either be placed manually or using the terrain LOD tree tool.

I am not a fan of the terrain detail system but I understand if someone would want it. I am going to include a AFS compatible model and all the plant textures are on one texture sheet. So that is a good replacement if you have the Advanced Foliage Shader pack.

 

Nice Pack @Baldinoboy
Btw i think WillyWill also have an account here, i just didn't remember what his user name is

 

I am still working on plants. A problem that I can not get help on though is SSAO does not work on this shader. Displays a blue outline of the tree. So I really want to use this new shader but SSAO will not be an option with it. Really stinks and will probably not be able to use it now. Will wait some more to see if I can get help.

 

Added to my wish list, as I already have your Coconut Tree Pack.

 

Thanks TheSealwolf. Hope Coconut Palm Tree Pack has served you well. I will be using the Shader stated above in an upcoming update to it also. Just need to nail down a new palm branch texture.

For the new shader I might have found a fix with the SSAO. So will try it out and assuming there is no more busy work to get a shader working in Unity hope to upload Tropical Forest Pack 1.1 this weekend to early next week. Busy with work and can only get in Unity on the weekends so sorry for taking so long. Will give you guys an update this weekend.

 

Hey guys,

Have tried to get the shaders working with SSAO to no avail. Have wasted a lot of time with it. Unfortunately I am not a programmer so shaders are not my thing. I like Shader Forge but it has its pain in the butt moments like this. So I will return to working on the update and continue converting trees to this new shader. Only problem is you can not use SSAO with the trees and plants.

Here is a quick shot of a couple more converted trees:



From now on will stick to the art side of things and keep the programming for........well........programmers . Will update on work done this next weekend.

 

Remember those woes I was having about shading? Well Lars came to my rescue.

Yeah. That is pretty much the biggest thing for me since the original launch of Custom Tree Importer. Smooth LOD transitioning and billboarding. Testing it out and there are a lot more amazing features that I will not say until he officially announces them.

So I have been working on the custom Shader Forge tree shader mentioned above and it was coming along okay but had its issues which I was not sure you guys as customers would be okay with. So the upcoming Custom Tree Importer update is going to be a much better solution.

The downside of this news is it will take a little more time for an update but I promise it will be worth it. Might upload a quick update to fix the current billboard shader and to test if Unity will allow some Image Effects.

Thanks guys. Will update.

 

Hi, I've had this pack on my wishlist for some time and hopefully will be able to get it in the near future. However, could I ask whether you have any plans to add a Mangrove tree? Thanks

 

Hey jonfinlay,

I did not have plans to add it but if it is wanted I will. Only problem is the very high tri count with the mangroves crazy root, trunk system. Will downscale it some but it will still probably be 6-10k tris with the roots done right. That is what LODs are for . So will get a couple mangrove trees in the upcoming update.

 

Excellent! But please don't make it solely on my behalf, because I haven't got your asset yet, however will let you know when I get it. I was just thinking about it yesterday when I was researching some islands and realised it is actually quite a common tree.

 

Definitely. I am not doing a coastal environment but mangroves are still handy for a water source you might want in a jungle. Also would work as great player blockers. So will do them.

 

Hi, in the editor the trees are looking nice and all work nice, but once I build the trees turn black. Im using unity 5.3.4

edit to add

 

Sorry about this problem. Have not had time in Unity since the last couple versions. Will check it out.

Edit- What platform are you building for that it does this?

 

Hey Thanx, I will try to re-import them and see if it makes any difference

 

Just did a windows build in both Dx11 and OpenGL using 5.3.4. Both worked with the trees staying textured and lit. I do not have a Mac to test this with. So if you are using a Mac build I will have to get some help to figure it out.

Let me know if the reimport helped.

 

Hi, i'm not using mac, I just did a few test builds and I dont think its your asset particular because some other trees are doing the same, only tree that works ok of the the Lod'd Kapok tree.
But strange thing is that if I just build with the 1 scene everything works nice, but if I included the loading scene too the trees look like the picture above apart from the lod'd Kapoks.
First I thought it was because I changed the shader to afs shader, but ir does the same thing, with 1 scene or 2 scenes.
I even tried with the reflection source, I tried with skybox and cubemaped but both do the same.

Really weird Unity bug maybe, I even looked and some others were saying to includ them in a folder called ''Ambient-Occlusion" but this doesn't work either.

My loading scene has nothing but a Ui and a script to load the main scene.

Anyway Thanx again, I will try to find more info in forums

 

Sorry man. Weird issue. Let me know what you find out.

What afs shader are you using? This can be the problem. May not be working with the terrain. Is the only gameobject tree not being placed on the terrain is the Kapok?

Definitely do not put these trees in an Ambient-Occlusion folder as this is for custom trees to use the soft lit AO tree shader.

 

I'm using afs 4 and Nature/Afs Tree Creator Bark Deferred Optimized and the Leaf equivalent. All the trees are placed with Terrain Composer which uses the standard terrain tree placement. Even for the lod'd Kapok.

Thanx Jimbob

 

Yeah that should be fine. Had a problem similar using Terrain Composer but it just made them black and did not remove the shading. Has been fixed since. Someone in the community will figure it out.

 

Hey @llJIMBOBll ,

Have you been able to get this problem fixed?

 

Hey, Yh It was due to Unity 5.3.4, maybe I the loading script wrong because they used a different loading technique for 5.3. So I switched back to 5.2.4 and all works nice Thanx Man

 

Good. Glad you got it working. Hope your project comes along great.

 

Sorry for not having any updates guys. Have a lot going on that has wiped away my time to work on my own projects. It is still in progress though. Last chance working on it I almost finished converting the old trees using CTI 3 and that in itself is a major improvement. Also played with the new cinematic image effects. Thank you Unity for those. Trees are full Deferred physically based shaded single-sided geometry with translucency. So much lower tri counts. Placed as LOD trees so have smooth LOD transition with random rotation. Thank you @larsbertram1 .



No new trees like Mangroves yet but there are plants and rocks coming in. Also reworking older trees like banana trees with new models and textures I took myself. Can also expect some real displacement ground textures. Purchased Photoscan and a new camera. Major tools to have for environment creation.

Should be able to get back to my normal routine in the next month and finish this up. Will update.

Thanks guys

 

beautiful!

 

Thanks Lars

 

Very good, I can not wait to see the new update.

 

That looks absolutely fantastic, the best rainforest scene I've seen! Will there be a price increase in the next update? Also, do you have any plans for 3D leaves (none exist on the Asset Store) and fallen fruit, such as a papaya and jatoba?

 

Thank you. So far now though this is just new shading and image effects. The new shading is awesome though. Initially I wanted to release Tropical Forest Pack for thirty dollars but was not thrilled releasing it without plants and rocks. So depending on the quality and amount added in the next update I will raise the price to $20-$30 for 1.1.

The leaves are alpha cutout textures on a 3d mesh. With the new single sided leaves tri counts are reduced and will allow for more detailed 3d plants, leaves. These are the current Papaya leaves



They are still bent planes but are pretty 3d. Also using these meshes for the particle leaves. So 3d leaves blow in the wind.

There will be fruit prefabs like Coconut, cupuacu, banana, and papaya. Not sure about jatoba fruit but when doing research about the jatoba saw the fruit is incredible for different ailments. So might be wanted in a survival game. If I do make Jatoba fruit I will not add it to the tree mesh but just as an individual prefab. Which is needed anyway so it can fall from the tree. Can do a particle system for these trees but it might look funny. Will see.

 

You convinced me! I've just bought it and I'm downloading now

Hopefully I'll have chance to share a few photos by the end of the weekend. I really appreciate the research you are putting into this, it makes a huge difference. The reason I mentioned the 3D leaves was so that I could put some on the ground floor with a collider and rigidbody so that they would interact with the player and animals, likewise with the fruit. I remember when I visited rainforests in Brazil what most caught my attention was the large number of papaya on the ground, very similar to this one.

In fact, the whole ground was covered with sticks and fallen branches. I've already added your free Nature Shield to my scene and placed it horizontally on the ground and it looks great. Although others may disagree, I think rocks are less important, mostly because in the forest they are largely covered by fallen leaves and secondly because there are a large number of good-quality free rocks and stones on the Asset Store, and there seems to be new ones released every week.

Anyway, really looking forward to using it, had been on my wishlist for ages

 

Thank you

As of now there is just the grass planes for ground cover, and I know there is very little grass in the jungle so it is a placeholder.

Not sure how performance would be with a bunch of rigidbodies but that is a cool idea. Did not know about so many papaya being on the forest ground. That is something I will get in both as static groups and some rigidbodies. Thank you for the advice.

Also with interaction there will be a separate version of the plants that will be setup for AFS with touchbending. So if you have AFS you will be able to place some interactive plants around that bend when the player walks into them.

I do agree with the rocks being less important. I am not going to put a lot of rocks in but just some smaller and larger ones would be great for a demo scene. Especially a cliff or two. I will not put it in front of plants and ground cover though.

Thank you for the purchase and advice. If anyone else has any ideas let me know. Even if I can not get it in 1.1 I will save it for a future update.

So far as of ideas/request from you guys I have:

>Ironwood Tree from Peruvian amazon
>Mangrove trees
>Leaf meshes for ground cover
>sticks and twigs ground cover
>more fruit and fruit ground cover

 

I'm very impressed with your package. Came with a lot more than I expected, and even though I've been using Unity for about 8 months, you've included a lot things I've never even seen before (like multichannel audio files and multiple wind zones). I absolutely love the falling particle leaves as well, although the ambient smoke used a lot of FPS on my computer so I doubt I'll use that. Haven't had chance to check out the example scene yet but I get the impression it'll be a great learning tool.

All the trees are perfectly done, especially the little details like the dead leaf on the banana plant and I really like the Dwarf Palmetto palms. Also the Cupuacu and especially the Kopak tree create perfect shadows, like in the screenshot below. I was using the free SpeedTree palms before, but they killed performance, but really didn't notice such a hit from your package.

The textures you have done are first class too. Although I didn't use them as I think fallen leaves textures are better suited to a rainforest. The ones I used below are from textures.com, then I used the normal map from your gravel texture which has a great 3D effect, something which I wasn't able to achieve myself. Hopefully you could add a few fallen leaves textures to a future update, because the quality of your textures is excellent (in fact the best I've found on the Asset Store).

I'll leave a review once I've checked out the demo scene, which will probably be tomorrow. I have Yughues Bushes & Weeds pack as well so will be great to see them together. Really great job you've done with this, looking forward to see what you come up with in the future.

 

Nice screenshot! Can not thank you enough for the comments @jonfinlay .

I agree about the smoke and ground texture. Would love some volumetric lighting effect. Would really help the scene. Made the smoke particle to have some depth but it destroys performance. So hopefully Unity will implement a decent, working volumetric lighting effect soon. The new shaders in the update will work with the fog effect. So the height fog will work with the billboards in 1.1. That helps.

Also with the ground texture I am going to add a nice leaf covered ground texture. Not sure how it will come out but trying to get a good real displacement texture using photogrammetry. So that is in the works. Will keep some of the current textures but with new maps.

Thanks again for the support and ideas. Will make sure to get in some time on the update this weekend.

 

Here's a nice open source volumetric lighting solution.
https://github.com/SlightlyMad/VolumetricLights

 

Eric! You just let me know about this. This looks amazing! Have tried different volumetric lighting solutions but they are either completely broken or lower the fps to single digits. Will have to try this out in the morning. Thanks for the post man.

 

No problem! The only thing with the pack is that the lighting doesn't work with transparent objects, so billboards are broken. But, in my experience, if you don't have massive amounts of objects in the scene then you can crank up the billboard start distance on the terrain and it'll work fine.

 

I have another idea about the leaves I mentioned earlier. I experimented with the 3D model of the Papaya leaf in your pack, however when I added a rigidbody and collider I couldn't get the effect I wanted because the leaf was too flat. Although I was able to put it in the stream and it looks great there. However the idea I had was to make a 3D model of the dead banana leaf which could be placed on the ground. You could use the same one, but other large leaves would be great too and I think they would work well for ground cover.

Also, would it be possible to separate the files in the next update so that the demo folder doesn't need to be imported? At the moment it contains useful prefabs like the particles and audio effects. Additionally, have two folders, one for AFS and the other for non-AFS files.

Additional ideas would be 3D fruits and seeds for ground cover, and fallen trees, stumps and branches. Animal burrows would be good as well. But really no need to rush to get anything in for the next update, these are just suggestions!

Very impressed with your example scene, I'm learning a lot from it. Here are two more screenshots, I used a few free assets like rocks and a fallen log which work well with your package. The second screenshot shows the dead banana leaf I mentioned above.

 

Sadly I couldn't use the Jatoba tree or the Kapok, the models themselves were fine, but I believe the shadows they cast over the other trees really caused a performance impact. Although I'll have another go in the future, would be a shame to leave them out.

 

Will be done

What do you mean? Have to include the demo scene with the pack.

Definitely want to get this in. Would love to have a thick ground cover. Only problem is getting it to work with the terrain system.

Thanks. Looks amazing! Nice level design.

While they do have higher tri counts have had more performance impact enabling shadows on plants, small trees than the larger trees. Think the shadow caster count has more of an impact than shadow coverage. Biggest performance impact with the larger trees I think is the large leaf planes alpha rendering. That is why getting the filtrate right is important.

 

Hi!
Your package is amazing. But the images in the Asset Store does not do it justice! I just bought it because I joined here in the forum and saw the images made by the users. I think if you improve their disclosure images, your sales will increase.

I would love if you added LOD to all the trees, I think it would help a lot in performance.

I will also contribute some images.





Keep up the good work!

Denis Lemos

 

Thank you. Awesome screenshots. Holy crap! Checked out your sky shading extension and it is beautiful! Going to have to try this out.

Reason for the not amazing screenshots is my first submissions the Asset Store reviewer wanted a few things fixed including image effects in the demo, pack, and screenshots. The person said it is not honest because not all versions of Unity have image effects. Apparently this Unity employee did not hear about Unity 5 Personal edition, which I was and still am using. So just to get this submitted a month after first upload I removed the Standard Assets and any image effects use.

The controller and image effects are in now but I have not updated the screenshots. So will wait till 1.1 to get the new screenshots up since it is going to look very different.

The system I was using for the current pack you had to place them on the terrain as regular trees and could not use LOD trees. Update 1.1 will include all LOD trees and LOD plants. Not only better for performance but placing LOD trees on the terrain enables the LOD tree random rotation placement and hue variation via CTI3's shading. So that is a major assist.

 

Here are a couple screenshots or WIP 1.1 in a simple night scene. Playing with the volumetric height fog effect @Eric2241 linked to above:




It is a cool effect. Love volumetric lighting. It has its bugs though so for now will just use it for fun.

 

Hey, have you experimented with switching off the shadows? I've been able to create a dense rainforest scene, with 10,000 trees on a 1km x 1km terrain. It plays well even on my laptop, and I think by turning off shadows is the only way of having a dense forest without a significant performance decrease. Due to the large trees there is very little light on the forest floor and I don't believe you really have shadows in an actual rainforest. It would be interesting to know whether you have tried this and therefore could recommend the best settings.

EDIT: I've just tried enabling shadows and there is very little difference in visual appearance but performance wise it falls to single-digits. Definitely worth considering.