while i am just finishing the work on the latest version of the advanced foliage shaders i would like to give you a sneak preview on one of its upcoming features which is “advanced billboarding” on trees placed within the terrain engine.
This means better fading between mesh tree and billboard containing:
faded wind animation
faded real time shadows on leafs and bark
faded point and spot lights
giving you the smoothest transition between mesh tree and billboard you have probably seen in unity so far
It also comes with a technique i call “real time shaded billboards” which i have developed together with tomaszek and becoming while working on the Relief Terrain Pack 3.0 demo. This technique will make your billboarded tree receive some kind of “real time shadows” from the terrain or any other given geometry.
Please note: When rotating the sun you may have to update the billboard textures manually (hit “4”) in case the camera has not rotated all at – as this is the “trigger” to make unity recalculate the billboard textures according to the given lighting situation. But you may also just check “Update billboard textures automatically”.
i have pushed the shaders a little bit further and now i have a billboard shader that does not simply render those annoying always upright orientated billboards but billboards which respond to the camera’s perpective!
The current billboards were so bad, that I had to use a 2nd terrain with different blending settings, to make a proper blending between mesh to billboard settings. They always popped up very visibly, no matter what I tried. Your solution seems to have solved that problems. I also hated these always upright orientated billboards, looking at the edges of the screen, you could always see that there was something wrong with them.
Thanks for this! I am looking forward to the release.
thanks to you both!
in fact i would not mind if the improved billboarding or anything else from the advanced foliage shader package got integrated into unity.
may be the day will come…
i just assembled a quick and dirty test scene which shows how a “fly” scene might look like (although i have written the shader to mainly support the first person perspective):
use “3” to roate the sun and see how the “shaded” billboards might look (do not forget to rotate a littel bit around to force unity to update the billboard textures).
use “4” to toggle between perspectively aligned and simply upright billboards. (the billboard shader will always perform advanced shadow and bending fading though, as it is not the built in one.)
Please note: it is absolutely ok if you get some kind of “extra punch” during the transition between billboard to mesh tree: that is the wind “fading in” which is set to “4”…
terrain settings:
– billboard start: 50
– fade length: 15
– max mesh trees: 75
Advanced foliage shaders + rtp 3.0 + this new billboard system + TC = All I need for my next terrain.
Thanks to bring unity engine to higher level with your great improvements!
With the new billboard perspective, I can imagine big cliff with deep forest up and below and a nice shadow covering one part of this forest.
I’ll test this weekend !
i have just updated the simple “fly” demo.
new in this version are:
fading billboards: they just fade out before they get culled (in order to make this visible i have set the “Tree Distance” to “380”.
dissolving tree shadows: in order to make the shadows casted by mesh trees not to just pop in (as the real time shadow distance is much higher than the billboards distance we won’t get fading in shadows casted by trees) i have implemented some kind of “growing shadows”. when used in conjunction with rather high camera movement speeds and soft shadows those might look quite ok (but can be simply disabled if you wish… ).
