Hi, I am an artist rather than a game developer. My projects are what you might call “art installations” if they were in the real world – an interactive summer landscape at http://bitsong.com and a model of the RGB color cube which lets you explore color in 3D at http://www.bitsong.com/Color%20Cube%20Build.html.
I’ve loved Unity for years and paid the pro fee for years too, but when I migrated my Unity 4 project to Unity5, it let me down in three critical areas.
No realtime shadows in the final build. They appear in the editor and game window, but no shadows at all appear in the build. I Googled this and found it was a frequent problem, but no definitive answer was found.
Trees turn pink or disappear. The tree creator trees in my landscape at first seemed to come through OK to Unity5, but if I try to change anything about their shaders, the trees turn pink and the leaves disappear. No amount of searching on Google or trial and error in Unity 5 has been able to solve this problem. Obviously it’s a shader problem, but I don’t know how to fix it.
No support for HTML5 and Bootstrap. I am trying to do a makeover of my website and would like to have it be responsive (be able to spontaneously adapt from desktop to tablet to phone setups). I am using Bootstrap in Dreamweaver to do this, and Bootstrap requires HTML5, but the code generated by the Unity build command is HTML4. HTML4 code won’t work in Bootstrap. The player fails to download.
So, no shadows, pink trees and no support for HTML5. My plan B, of course, is to go back to Unity4. Wish I hadn’t wasted the time trying to upgrade. Thanks for listening to my rant.
Pink trees? Try fixing the shaders. A lot has changed from 4 to 5.
You as a user have to learn the new features and how to use them as with any program.
Don’t blame an software package for something that you don’t want to take the time to learn to use. And Unity 5 is a HUGE jump in many different areas that requires relearning.
Not trying to be mean but honestly posts that blame software for user error is getting very old.
Archiania, Thanks for your thoughts. Just for the record, I did quite extensive research and experimentation over a period of a week trying to solve my three problems. I found quite a few posts by people with the “no-shadow” problem and tried many of the suggestions – no luck. I didn’t find others with the pink tree problem, but there were many posts with other rendering problems of Tree Creator trees. I don’t know shader language, so I can’t try to fix it that way, but I tried everything else.
The “no-HTML5” problem is perhaps the most serious. I know that Unity is developing WebGL and has a preview build available, but as it stands now the Unity web player is unsupported on more platforms and devices than it is supported on – not supported on iPhone, Android, tablets, Chrome etc. It does still run on Explorer and Firefox.
Here’s the rundown: I made two sets of builds, a complicated one (my landscape) and a simple one (terrain, tree, cube). One set of builds was the standard web player and one set of builds was using WebGL. Interestingly, the simple project did come through with shadows in the WebGL build though not in the standard web player. Neither project came through with shadows in either the WebGL build or the web player.
It was nice to see my project work (except for shadows) in WebGL, but I am assuming that when WebGL is officially released it will cost another $1500. I am not running a studio, I’m just an individual doing an art-for-art’s-sake kind of thing – can’t afford another $1500.
I think you have wrong impression about the whole thing. In the original post the one described third makes no sense. What does HTML4 or Bootstrap have anything to do with Unity? if you mean the plugin then thats not even part of the “standards”.
In your later post you talk about WebGL but the fact is thats not even in the hands of Unity as the support depends on the browsers too. It will probably years to get stuff working on any device and browser.
I wasn’t saying anything against you. It happened to me too about the pink trees. I didn’t automatically think that Unity is junk and is poor. Instead I looked at what was causing the issues and fixed it. Simple. It was me that didn’t understand what happened due to the massive changes for the better that caused it. So I had to learn more about the software I was using.
Same went for scripts. Errors that Unity didn’t automatically fix. Not a big deal. I took my time with a cup of coffee and went through the list of stuff I had to fix. Again it wasn’t Unity’s fault.
And this miss information about having to pay more is wrong. Again people(not necessarily you) but jump to the wrong conclusion about things and automatically assume that it’s correct. And then post this wrong information online having others jump on board and spreading miss information. Kinda like how names start in high school due to ignorance.
This is supposed to be a forum for more mature people using a software for making games and stuff. Not a bunch of 3rd graders jumping up and down and holding their breaths because Unity isn’t giving them what they want.
Sorry rant.
Ah. It looks like you’re probably still running in forward and your shaders are all out of date, or you just mangled quality settings. Get rid of all quality settings to debug it, leaving only fantastic. Use standard shader to test. If shadows still don’t appear then please post your hardware specs and report a bug…
Upgrading between major versions ie 4.x to 5.x will always be problematic as much does change.
Thanks Eric5h5. That’s good news indeed. I had read some time ago that it would cost. Is it going to be completely free?
Hi Archania, How did you fix your pink trees. I’d really appreciate your sharing. Thanks.
Hi ippdev, I already have my terrain on Built in Legacy Diffuse
You sure? It changed mine to standard shader and I was baffled for hours how I could see shadows in the Editor but not in any builds… Then I found that under the terrain gear icon settings that it was changed to Standard Shader.
Pink trees, do you have any assets in the build?? Some can conflict with certain shaders, I would try a new project and see if the same issue happens, so that way you can figured out what is causing it, normally its a shader, I delete shaders or rename them so they dont cause any issues, I have that issue when I use Skyshop, Terrain composer or any other asset…
But this happens alot with assets so I wonder if you have any…
Hi IppDev, I went back to the 4x version of my project and looked at the terrain settings. It had no shader at all in the material slot, so I added a material using the Nature/Terrain/Diffuse shader. Then I reimported this to Unity5. The terrain came in with the same shader I had used in 4x – the nature shader. I tried building it with this shader, but no luck – no shadows. Thanks for your help anyway.
Hi Archania, I found a fix for my pink trees. Turns out the old Hidden/Nature/TreeCreator etc shaders were causing the problem. They were calling for a Cg snippet that didn’t exist in the new Unity5 shader model. Here’s a link if you’re interested: http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ShaderTut2.html. I disabled that whole bunch of old shaders and now my trees are no longer pink.
Hi Eric5h5. Thanks so much for the link and information that Unity is going to support WebGl with no added cost. I apologize for jumping to the conclusion that it would cost.
Hi Hippocoder, I followed your steps. I switched to Defferred lighting which caused my trees to have white outlines around their edges. Fixed that by turning off “receive shadows” on all the mesh renderers for all the leaves as per White outline around tree leaves after upgrade to Unity 5 - Questions & Answers - Unity Discussions – not ideal, but it works. Changed all my shaders to standard. Changed quality setting to Fantastic. Did a build – no shadows So I am in the process of filing a bug report now. Thanks for your advice.
My hardware specs are: Windows7 64 bit OS, Intel Core i7-4770 CPU @ 3.50GHz, 32 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 graphics card with 2048 MB GDDR5.
Hi Recon03. Thanks, I just figured that out for myself – deleted obsolete shaders. Thanks.
Hmmm. there may be some other issue. Sorry I can’t be of help. What I suggested worked immediately for me after several hours of web search and banging my head against the wall. Maybe export the raw height map and splat maps and remake the terrain in U5?
Thanks ippdev, but remaking the terrain is not an option. I spent about 2 years making the whole project and a lot of that time was on grass, flowers and ground cover. I can still use the landscape in 4x, just wanted it to upgrade it for going forward in the future. Thanks.
Hi Eric, I know the splat map will preserve the texture “painting,” but can you export a terrain raw height map and splat maps and have it come back into the project with the grass and flowers still intact? Thanks.
