ForestVision [ Artist Essentials Product ]

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ForestVision is a unique approach to creating trees in your scenes. Trees are customizable, right in the editor! AND you can build your own varieties in the editor as well!

Includes built in tools and shaders which provide you with the means to build out a custom tree, and collapse it down to a single mesh, perfect for Terrain painting!

As a designer, I found myself artistically constrained with simple trees that I could not tweak in the editor. I would have to result to going back to SpeedTree, or some other tree app and make a new alteration there, then import the new variety and hope it fits with my vision of the scene. After a while, I decided I needed to just build a library of assets that gave me the freedom I wanted. Hence, the creation of ForestVision.

Simple productivity tool, allows you to easily reset the transforms of your trees if you find that base scales are not fitting with your scene. Perfect for scale, or setting new pivot points on your meshes!

What you are getting with this package is an incredible amount of resources to enable the artist to truly explore their vision for a scene. From initial tree setups all the way down to individual branches, I am giving you everything you need to build entire forests, or even just specialized worlds where the vegetation needs to be unique. Each Foliage texture is vertex animated giving life to the leaves, and branches.

My initial thought was to call this product “TreeKit” as that is just what it is, a collection of assets that are pulled together to create new, fresh species of plants and trees.

The beauty of this product, and another reason why I sought out to create my own library, is that each tree is fully customizable. Using the wealth of assets provided, you can make the perfect “hero” tree. Speedtree and Unity’s trees are perfect if you want fast procedural trees that simply populate your background. But if you want trees that actually can help tell your story, this is the way to go.

For example, you have a tree that looks wonderful, but from your main shot, you can see that your tree is composed of very flat polygons with images mapped onto them. This really kills the immersion when you can spot such incredibly flat surfaces.

With ForestVision, that flat branch can be rotated, or duplicated to help remove that noticeable flat surface, returning your tree to a seemingly full and lush entity in your world.

Ready made trees–which can be altered to your hearts content at any time
Vines, bushes, flowers, leaves, ground vegetation, grasses, as well as the building blocks of every tree, and for new trees that you can create!

13 Likes

Amazing images, but

  • Video, Webplayer or WebGL-Player?
  • LOD?
  • PBR?
    …
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Impressive looking. Are your screenshots from demo scenes, included in the package?
Also…how’s performance?

Looking good!

I’m working on getting a video together, as well as a webplayer demo.

Currently these assets support just about any shader that you can find as they are simply models. They ship using the speedtree shader, but I am developing the shaderforge version now, and soon will write my own shader to add in the wind animation.

I ship each trunk texture with its Diffuse, Normal, AO and Height maps. Leaf maps–since Speedtree has the proper 2 sided material setup, ship with Diffuse and Normal.

I have switched certain models–mainly branches over to the Standard Shader for some shots where I need the specularity that the Speedtree or Unity Tree shader simply do not offer.

In regards to LODs, I use MeshBaker to bake down versions of the trees that I like into more draw call friendly versions. I will be including these baked models in a future update as well.

Most of my work currently is geared towards a 4K res short film animation and I simply do not need LODs. I need those trees in the distance to maintain the detail they have. But because you can create any tree you want from this package, you can make your LOD varieties.

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Sounds very interesting to me.
I absolutely like the idea of a shaderforge shader!
What about 3D transforming to billboards, do you support this?
Please dont forget to support horizontal billboards for vertical topdown views like in a flightsimulator.
Speedtree still sucks here.

Looking forward to see video and webplayer!

I will definitely keep those things in mind! Thanks!

The screenshots of the different environments are not included as they contain too many other 3rd party plugins.

I primarily use Gaia for initial env lay down, then Time of Day for lighting and fog effects, coupled with a handful of post processing effects.

Performance wise the assets themselves are very optimized polygonally, but wanting to give artists more freedom, and ease of customization, I did not focus too heavily on draw call optimization. That is where MeshBaker comes in.

Most of those scenes are incredibly high in draw calls and poly counts because I was going for an artistic vision, not focused on delivering it on a platform other than video or high res screen shots. But again, my hope is that it frees the artist up to create their own trees that meet their specific needs. My personal trees, and scenes can get very intense, mainly because I have a Titan X in my work machine, but also because I’m always capturing screenshots at 4K+ and then going in and seeing where I can push things.

If I worked up some examples that strictly used out of the box Unity tools would that interest you?

Main reason I did not do this approach initially is because I wanted to show my final works using the assets.

3 Likes

I really like whats going on here. I use and am always looking for a great set of trees to use in my environments. But I’m confused by what you mean customizable? Are you meaning that each branch/leaf is a seperate model and you move by hand yourself in the editor with the move and rotate tools or the tree itself has customizable options to move things around such as what speed tree provides in there editor. Looking really good though can’t wait to test out and see how this evolves.

Yes so definitely trees have to have a wind component with customizable options how to control the wind. Without wind on trees and vegetation scenes feel and look flat and uninteresting so def please get that working first very important as your making customized shaders for your system.

Some sort of roots or things to control the bottom half of the way trees look to give them that natural bottom look. Just scaling out the bottom of trees doesn’t work anymore for games.

-Miguel

I agree that wind is important to have, luckily shaderforge does ship with a basic vertex animation system so it won’t be too hard to get things going. As far as writing my own shader, that will be a tad more of a process.

When I say customize, I mean that each tree is made up of a trunk and branches. Each branch has a proper pivot for rotation and scale at its base for positioning. All of these come together as prefabs that you can do with as you please.


I provide almost 20 base prefab trees to start you off.

Additionally, you have 12 different branch base meshes to chose from, which are composed of the branch itself, and then the leaf mesh. You then have base leaf meshes to further fluff out your trees with. I also provide you with the PSD files which contain the UV layout for all of these leaf meshes so you can tweak that as well.


As bonuses, to help you complete your ultimate ForestVision I added in a collection of Flora…

A collection of ground vegetation, from grass, to dry bamboo, to dead leaves, moss and dead branches…

And finally, a nice collection of vines.

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Looks great - interested to see how you go with this - and thanks for the Gaia mention - I put a post on the Gaia thread and recommended that people come check this out :slight_smile:

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Looks great! I like all of the tree parts I’m hearing about. I don’t see stumps mentioned though. Will those be available as well?

look great

Looking great,

Is it possible to do an earlier Unity version submission, 5.2 maybe ?
You are automatically reducing your possible user base by release with latest version only

Cheers
Cobus

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So beautiful!!! just bought it, I advise everyone to do the same :slight_smile:

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That’s awesome Adam, thanks a ton!

I agree with you, I will be pushing up a 5.2 version this week. I was having a terrible time with Unity crashing on upload–I originally went all the way back to 5.0, but that was where all the crashes happened. So out of frustration, I tried in the only other version I had installed, which was the latest obviously–and the upload went through.

Thank you for reminding me, I will make a push tonight to upload it in 5.2

2 Likes

Awesome, jimmi! Thank you, please submit a review if you get the chance, I would greatly appreciate that.

Thanks,
I bought it as well in support and I would like to use it, in the very least v5.2 would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers
Cobus

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Yes I do have the stumps as well. :slight_smile: Thanks for reminding me!

2638312--185615--Capture.JPG

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