Hi folks!
Just another nature walking simulator here.
Do it for myself in my spare time to relax and wander around.
I haven’t even come up with a name yet.
Screens:
Video (quality is meh):
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Gorgeous! Out of curiosity, are you willing to give any info as to what resources you used for the elements of this scene?
Either way, keep up the good work 
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How do you have sky occlusion? Are you using something like occlusion probes, similar to what unity created for the Forest HDRP demo? Also, what render pipeline? Looks very impressive!
Honestly gives me kingdom come deliverance vibes, which is big considering that game has some of the nicest looking vegetation and lighting! This is one the best forest scenes I’ve seen in a game.
Tell us all the secrets! 
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Glad you like it guys!
Some of grass textures are from “Realistic grass pack” from Unity Asset Store. Few textures from Quixel and CG Textures, the rest are homemade textures and models.
For sky occlusion I made shadow-accumulative volumetric cascades, with 3-component directional data per voxel, it works as custom injection into Built-in RP.
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Out of curiosity, how did you do the paths? Are they terrain textures painted on a very high resolution splatmap or splines?
Anyway, this looks fantastic, it’s one of the best and most natural scenes I’ve ever seen in Unity!
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Paths are 2D SDFs produced by shader code. Painted textures was not an option, resolution would be too high indeed.
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Oh dear, I wanted to make myself something like this and now I see it here in perfection… I think I still try to do my version, but this looks really beautiful!
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Would be cool to try this in a demo build or so! Looks fantastic, how did you achieve such quality and so on, wow!
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Thanks a lot guys, it’s very encouraging!
I tried to get better quality by using custom written material shaders, and custom light pass.
If there is anything specific you want to know, I can try to explain better.
I hope that when I finish with the base set of planned features, I’ll make a tech-demo build.
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are you evaluating 2D SDFs in your terrain rendering shader for deciding which texture to sample?
You added a custom light pass to the build-in renderpipeline? Since the Build-in renderpipeline is not that flexible I guess you added some kind of voxel-based light/shadow accumulation to achieve the bright and dark areas within the forrest right? Whatever you did, it looks stunning! Keep up the good work this is simply amazing!
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Thanks a lot, Kreshi!
Yes, you are right about SDFs, I do exactly that.
Regarding the render pipeline, I decided to use the built-in deferred pipeline because of its performance and feature set.
It is indeed less flexible than URP or HDRP, but it is good enough for command buffer injections.
It could be that I just didn’t dig deep enough, but I always had troubles of different kinds with URP and HDRP.
With built-in RP everything “just works” and is “fast.”
The voxel-based light and shadow accumulation guess is also right.
I do also use multiple volumes to accumulate light data, so it’s a kind of cascading solution to cover a bigger distance (approx. 7 km from the player position), and each volume updates in runtime when player position or sunlight angle deviation reach certain thresholds.
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Thanks for the explanation!
From a “getting things done” perspective, your approach of choosing the well documented build-in pipeline is absolutely understandable and valid :).
Do you use trilinear interpolation for smoothing the voxel data or blur or do you use both?
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I wonder if adding some life, eg animals, insects would be good, not much just some.
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Documentation is the key to ease pain, for sure:).
Voxel data is sampled in the shader as a full-volume 3D texture with standard trilinear filtering.
Light accumulation is processed for each texel in volume, so there is no need to have light probes since the whole space around is filled with light data.
I was thinking about adding flying insects and flocks of birds. But I’m not sure about other animal types yet.
Also, some flowing water/river, there are assets that can simulate a real flowing water/river. Or Rain/weather changes.
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that is a good idea, but when i saw the video for me it felt like it was alive, now that i’m thinking about idk why was that, maybe the sun effect, the lighting and the wind, in fact i have to say i learn something watching your video
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Dynamic weather is something I plan to add together with day/night cycle.
But river system is not part of short-term plans. Since world creation happens in runtime, building riverbeds on the fly would be a challenge, I have some ideas in mind but it would need more research.
Thank you, impheris, that’s nice to hear!
Amazing job!, definitely would love to see some tech-details with all resources you were using to learn this
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That’s brilliant!
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