I’m wondering if there’s a nicer way to add skyline/tree line in the background of my scenes. These scenes are fishing lakes and are for mobile as well as PC. Currently I have a ‘carboard cutout’ style background which looks a bit rubbish & I scatter various speed trees.
Maybe I could make the cross type tree with an alpha channel but then overdraw would be an issue as I’d need to use a lot in some backgrounds.
Anyone have any suggestions please?
Anyone?
do you have example image that you are aiming at?
Cutout shader is one option (not need full transparent material then)
Could combine all “background” trees into single plane or 360 plane too. (or will there be need for parallax effect?)
This is from my game (not the same lake), as you can see it leaves a lot to be desired.
I forgot to say I use a realtime sky system, so can’t really use skyboxes, although did wonder if I could just add the treeline with transparency instead of sky somehow
you dont need tech here, just better lighting and composition. In other words, rearrange what you got already.
Google “art fundamentals: color theory, composition”
//in no particular order.
If you want photographic quality from the first image, you’d need to use photographic skybox of the real sky. But, It won’t be realtime.
If you want realtime sky, then you can’t use THOSE cutout trees, because they won’t react to the changes of the sky properly.
It is possible that there’s some experimental way to work around that, but in that case you’d waste your time experimenting and t hat’s the time you could’ve spent publishing your game.
You COULD add transparent trees on top of whatever you’re using for skybox shader, by hacking the shader.
In your scenario the picture does not look good, because background trees are blurry, and t hey’re blurry because they’re using low resolution textures. You could improve the situation by using higher resolution individual trees, and then pasting them around the area, BUT that will increase overdraw.
In my opinion what you could try to aim for is Richard Burns Rally quality of trees.
They used cutout trees without alpha blending, but the trees were photographic and they plastered a ton of t hem.
However, richard burns rally did not have dynamic sky system.
So maybe try to guess average sky color (based on sky parameters) and tint the trees with it.
Regarding realtime sky, that depends on what you’re trying to achieve. You could take a look at morrowind sky, for example, back in the day it was quite impressive.
P.S. If I rememebr correctly it is possible to use video stream for skybox.
Thanks, my game is already released on mobile and PC. Has been for years. I’m currently updating it, trying to improve it before console release.
I’ve increased the resolution of the background trees, they look a little better now than in the screenshot but not by much. The sky system uses a light, so the trees get effected by that and look ok.
Wouldn’t adding lots of cut-out trees add a lot of overdraw? That would be mad for the mobile versions? On PC I use vegetation studio to add extra trees around the lake but it’s the rubbish backgrounds that I’m trying to improve.
Thanks, I’ll take a look
Find similar games, see how they do it.
Yes.
You’d have to test it. It might just work.
Personally I’d try to go for something like 3 layers and see if I can make them render from front to back, but if mobile is using tile-based rendering, there might not be a point in doing that.
One obvious difference between your reference photo and your screen shot is that the lake in the reference photo looks like the lake is in the low point between many hills, whereas your screen shot has a very flat terrain. Maybe you could use terrain features to limit your view distance and make your environment more interesting at the same time? …or maybe that’ll just make things more complicated.
I thought the whole point of cutout is that it is binary, on or off, no blending, so no overdraw?
I found your questions because I have similar ones. I’m also using Enviro and want that gorgeous sky. I could swear I’ve seen games use a blend of real near distance trees to sort of obscure the rough stuff, and far away cutout trees done to good effect, but I’m having trouble with finding the sweet spot between low res skyline stuff getting clipped once it’s far enough away to not be obvious, as well as not knowing how to get a nice fog or blur to smooth the transition that’s cheap enough for mobile (or in my case, browser/VR). Am thinking maybe post process?
No, it’s not like that as far as I know, might be wrong though.
Yeah this is the issue, I can use lots of low poly stuff and imposters etc in the background on a PC/Console game but on mobile, especially for me as mines a fishing game with a rather demanding water system with planer reflections, I’m pretty limited.
At the moment I’m thinking rather than one tree border background like i have now, i should have maybe 3, to give a little more depth.
Take a look at this: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/fullscreen-camera-effects/dynamic-fog-mist-2-48200
I use this in the past and it’s pretty performant, but as always it depends on what else you have going on in your game
Thank you!
I’ve used imposters on mobile and similarly low spec hardware specifically because of their performance gains. Half the reason anything I’ve shipping on Switch works at all is because of aggressive use of imposters.
For this, however, you’re probably not going to need that much. You could probably get away with billboards for a select few trees and then have meshes that have clusters of trees on them as a texture. In doing this, you can get a much more varied look than just a single treeline texture.