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

Not home, but you didnt include uNature in the package did you?

 

They did.

 

I wanted you to try the project as it came off my PC, just in case there was something iffy about the version of uNature I was using, or the FoliageDatabase, or the materials or... well anything I suppose!

 

Then PM the link, don't put it out in the public. People can grab that link and download a paid asset.

 

I really don't want to sound rude, but I really dont know what to say now, you could have just pm'd me...

Please remove the link from your message.

Yep...

 

you still have the link on the "[" character

 

Hi, Elroy!
I checked your Trello, seems the integration with MapMagic is completed and need testers, may I ask a beta version to run the test?

 

Hey, absolutely!

PM me with your invoice and email and I will add you

 

Is it possible to get more mobile testers Elroy?? Seems i'm the only one willing to test for mobile.. Yet to get replies after I send people APK's... Would be great. I know there is not many, but maybe if you advertise it, that we need more with tablets for sure. Just to get a few more people . if possible , Thoughts? Even if its one or two others, willing to actually report back would be great.

 

Absolutely...
I will see what I can do about it.

 

Thanks.!

 

Interesting suite of tools!

I'm looking for a GPU instancing tool for placement of geometry grass and rocks with potentially random rotations and align to normal functionality. Also, if possible, some sort of lighting being applied. It seems UNature can do some of what I need, but what about lighting within the shaders? Object rotation?

Thanks!

 

Hey!

Thanks for your nice words! loving your tools as well

uNature could handle any kind of a mesh as long as its only 1 mesh per object and 1 material (Could be expanded in the future)

That means that you can use rocks, grass, or really anything you want as long as its 1 mesh and 1 material.

Also, yes uNature indeed support lighting hehe and also object rotation, random width and random height.

But again, please notice that you must have 1 mesh and 1 material

 

Quick question: does uNature's tree system support SpeedTree?

 

The trees system doesn't do any custom rendering yet. It only adds colliders so you can interact with each tree.
A custom rendering solution for trees is planned but for now I am focusing more on the grass aspect

 

Can I destroy trees with military tanks or trucks with this asset?
So, that the tree falls when I ride a tank over it.

Does the grass support real-time deformation from vehicles?

 

I love the grass copy speed in the beta. 2^km takes 1 minute instead of 15!

 

Yep for both

Happy to hear! Will try to optimize it even more

 

Hi, we're using uNature 2.1. I'm having an issue with projections not showing on uNature grass. We are using a projector for cloud shadows in our world. I've verified that the grass is rendering to the correct layer, and everything else on that layer receives the cloud shadow projection. But the grass shows no difference.

I saw earlier in this thread you mentioned to check the shaders. The shaders have the "IgnoreProjector" = "False" tag. I've even removed the tag all together, but either way there's no projections on the grass.

Is there something else I can try? Or is this a known issue?

Thanks!

 

Hey,

Indeed its a known issue and for now there's not really a fix because of the way unity's projector is built.
I am working on a workaround tho...

 

Ah ok, thanks for the quick reply! I would definitely love to know when you do have a work around available. The grass looks great in scene, but of course in places that the shadow projection shows through from the terrain underneath it, make the grass look out of place. But if that gets fixed, it'll look beautiful.

 

Absolutely,
I hope to get it before the release of V2.2, if not then most likely early V2.3 beta

 

Two questions:
1. I am getting an undesirable row pattern when I place grass with uNature. Thus:


2. When I place the grass and play, the colors appear brighter than the healthy/dry colors would suggest.

Can you help me understand these issues.

 

Hey!

Regarding the pattern issue - actually fixing that as we speak in the beta lol, will have it pushed later today.

Regarding colors - that's strange, can you show me an example?

 

Hey guys - sorry for being so quiet,
V2.2 is coming along VERY well, infact I am 2 tickets away from completing it (Videos will be done when in submission phase)
https://trello.com/b/I4kqOpDC/unature

I mostly write about the progress on slack so if you didn't join yet feel free to do so
http://eeproductions-unature.signup.team/

Some stuff to note -

1) New demo is done with HUGE thanks to @turboscalpeur for providing some of his grass assets, I will also end up adding it as a playable demo to the forums when V2.2 is submitted
2) Finally FIXED the terrain copying issues - As you know it was very buggy in the past few weeks/months and now its fully stable

And well... LOTS more Feel free to check the trello that's linked above and post some of your suggestions in the comment section here/ in trello

 

I've got a quality of life feature request.
A button to click that would go through all the manager instances in the scene and automatically destroy all those that contain no grass. Would save loads of time on big maps, and reduce the total scene file size in the process.

 

Brilliant!

Will add

 

Just tried it out. Works beautifully.... You've saved me some sanity

 

Hehe happy to know

 

I need background trees. Lots of them. They don't need colliders or whatnot. uNature should be able to do this perfectly but you have indicated that it doesn't work with trees and there doesn't seem to be the possibility of turning down the density enough to make it look right. Any thoughts?

 

uNature only adds colliders for trees, not performance (for now)
For grass its a completely different story.

So I don't think uNature will help with your trees performance by a lot unfortunately :/
There are other solutions for that though like AltTrees.

When I make uTrees (and I will) it will hopefully optimize trees by a huge amount and will fullfil your wish, but for now unfortunately uNature wont be able to do it :/

 

Can you give a slightly more detailed answer as to why it won't work? Or will it work for this one circumstance, but not for most?

 

Basically the reason why trees can't be treated as grass in the system is because it currently only supports 1 mesh and 1 material per grass type.

Using more than that will simply not be efficent for grass and will be slow. For that kind of a usage I plan to make the trees system which will allow you to use as many meshes and as many materials and still work properly.

 

Hey guys -
Going to most likely submit V2.2 today and then finish up the video tutorials (Was waiting on V2.2 to be completed)

V2.2 is really really amazing with a lot of new features and it should have honestly been V2.0 but hey, at least we are there now

V2.3 will be even better so stay tuned!

(Changelog will come later today when its submitted)

 

What's the optimal workflow for worldstreamer now?

Do I uNaturefy the terrain before or after splitting?
Should I add a manager to each split scene manually? on the play scene? How much is handled automatically?

 

Good question, you should basically use uNature before splitting but I plan to make it fully automatic for V2.3

 

uNature V2.2 has finally been submitted!

You can see full changelog here:
https://trello.com/b/I4kqOpDC/unature

And get the version before it's accepted by messaging me your invoice privately.

Furthermore, now there are 2 demos included in the asset store page for windows, feel free to give feedback!

ForestDemo - https://mega.nz/#!2IRBnTjA!iJ5h8k6kRzkT0yL_C9I_aYnKAdwdpa--AgIJfhz2l0I
Controls are visible at the top left. Note that I made sure not too use too much grass so it wont be too heavy on really old machines and that's why you might not see TOO much of a performance boost. Using 250 view distance instead of the current amount (100 if I recall) I was able to get much better boost results. But eitherway it should show you the overall benefits of uNature


Runtime editor demo - https://mega.nz/#!aZZgmDqD!oOOxa_AQjxoLW5sZTv0PTiY-Uhep92sWS4eWYz8l9VE
Controls are again very simple, in order to paint select a prototype/ prototypes (hold ctrl for selecting more than one) and also select a brush.

Note that in order to remove grass you will need to decrease "Erase density" to 0 and hold shift. (Similar to UE4's painting)

 

I tried the ForestDemo and iam a bit dissapointed. I thought uNature can give me a performance boost. Or is my graphics card the bottleneck here?
uNature:

Unity Grass:

 

Hey - that's a first one
That could probably be the case as uNature heavily focuses on the gpu to reduce overhead from the cpu.
On my machine for example I get 120fps with uNature and around 89fps with unity. (And much higher difference when using bigger draw distances)

What are your specs?

[Sorry I am blind didn't see it on the picture lol... I will go ahead and figure it out, your graphics card shouldn't be the issue honestly. Thanks for the report!]

Thank you very much for testing btw!

 

@HellPatrol Sorry for double post, but seems like I figured it out -

Did you disable the uNature lods accidently? (L)
It seems like you also enabled shadows which explains the HUGE fps issues please disable them on F2.

You had me worried there!

 

I tested it again, I changed no settings. ~50fps uNature / 45-50 fps with unity grass. With shadows it drops down to around 20-25fps.

 

Yes shadows are VERY heavy and not recommended unless you are targeting beast pcs OR using very low densities.
In the demo case its pretty medium-high density so it works very poorly there.
But happy you are gaining some performance non the less

V2.3 will focus heavily on GPU optimizations so hopefully it should be less heavy on the gpu

 

Screen space shadowing seems to be the solution for grass shadows. I hear the performance is excellent. Not sure if you've looked into it.

 

Thanks guys. I keep that in mind. I have a top down view and some ssao give me pretty good results without using shadows.
But I try to get my hands on screen space shadowing

 

Yep I agree, the normal cast shadows as I said before should only be used in certain circumstances and for others, screen space shadows will work better

 

I know that @sonicether does a nice Screen Space Shadows implementation on the Asset Store here https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/77836

 

Yup, and there should be another option coming sometime soon, that is part of a larger shadowing solution (NGSS).

 

I'm always wary of having to modify core Unity files tbh because its a nightmare for source control

 

Hey guys going to have to delay the release of the new version in 1 day, found a memory leak and a map magic issue that I must fix, will resubmit today!

 

Hey guys - forgot to update but V2.2 has been resubmitted yesterday with a lot of fixes (mainly optimizations and memory fixes)

What I want to ask you guys for V2.3 is about this card - https://trello.com/c/bM9V2w2d/171-create-presets-for-the-foliage-management


Basically I want to allow it so you can have different presets for prototypes, so you don't have all of your prototypes on one database.

Now, would you guys prefer:

1) Preset
2) Unique database for each scene


Thanks for your feedback as always!