2 questions on trees

Unity Engine
1

Both problems regarding trees with billboard leaves.

First of all, I can’t understand how the UV of the leaves are mapped on the texture.
I expected a billboard to be a leaf or group of leaves, but apparently it’s not like that.

1237668--52631--$leafuv.jpg
1237668--52631--$leafuv.jpg835×576 161 KB

I tried to make the same of the palm tree by splitting the texture in 2 but it’s not right.

The second problem is that all the plants have shrinking leafs while one gets farther from the tree (for performance I think).
I NEED the leafs in the right proportion with the tree, I DON’T NEED this kind of optimization.
Is there a way to disable this?
And, if it’s not possible to disable it, is it possible to export the trees as meshes?

2

No botanists on this forum? :roll_eyes:

3

  1. I assume you’re using the Tree Creator? The billboard is a leaf or group of leaves. So your UV’s should just be set up as a basic square over a picture of a leaf or branch. Like the sample “Big Tree” in the terrain assets. I can’t tell what’s wrong with your leaves in that picture… the leaves look ok; the trunks look like tiny lines though.

  2. When you make a tree in the tree creator it turns it into a prefab, which is a mesh, so you can drag that in directly as a mesh and use it. It only gets treated specially if you’re using it as a tree through the terrain tool.

I don’t know what you mean about leaves shrinking; I’ve never seen that. What you might be seeing is the tree converting to a billboard (the whole tree becomes a single billboard) because your Billboard Start distance is too close. Click the Terrain, click the Settings icon, and under “Tree and Detail Objects”, increase Billboard Start and Max Mesh Trees.

4

Yes I’m talking about the Unity tree maker.
And that’s exactly what I did, the most easy and common set up: I have put a branch or group of leaves in a texture and left space from the margin.

I like the impostor feature… I want it.
I only don’t want the shrinking leaves :-x
I’ll upload a webplayer tomorrow so you can see it.

5

hi there,

you might want to have a look at the tree creator tutorial:
http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/TreeCreator_Tutorial

lars

6

Eh thank you, but I read that already throughly and it doesn’t answer to my questions (or I have missed something, it’s possible).

  1. misaligned billboard texture. I placed a bunch of leaves in the center of a texture, and the billboard is messed up. And I can’t find ANY control about the billboard UV or similar.

  2. Leaves shrink with distance. I’m sure this is some kind of undocumented optimization, but I NEED those leaves stay the right proportions at any distance. What I want, is only the impostor to activate at some distance. I would like to keep using the Unity terrain system because it’s greatly optimized, but I can’t if these things are not solved.

I will try to build like the tutorial does and see where my leaf texture gets misaligned UVs. Maybe I can spot the “problem”.

7

hi,

simply: do not use billboarded leaves!
see the tutorial to find out why.
using meshes i am not aware of any problems like shrinking leave planes at all.

lars

8

Hmmm… I wanted to use billboards because they give the highest rate of covering per polygon… they always face the camera, so nothing beats them.
But ok. Seems I’ll have to surrender to this.

And what about the UV?