[NEW PATCH] uNature - GPU, Interactable Grass. Interactable Trees, MultiThreading and more!

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Hey Everyone!

uNature is a new tool which handles two things, Grass and Trees.

On the grass aspect it completely replaces unity’s grass and adds a ton of features to it! For instance:

• Very powerful, procedural grass mechanics (Draw anywhere you want on your scene, whether its a terrain or any kind of a surface without it affecting your performance)

• Supports color maps (read colors from the surface), dynamic surfaces and soon translucency

• Supports shadow casting, custom rendering layer for each prototype, LODs and individual wind setting.

• Works on the GPU and fully utilizes the power of the machine. Reducing all of the spikes that unity’s grass has and allows instant grass modifications. Yes, That means NO MORE patch rebuilding!!!

• Fully modular, can be customized to work on almost any scenario and can be used on any platform (didn’t yet find a platform that it didnt work on)

• Copies from the terrain precisely and takes exactly 2 min to set it up in your project.

• Interactions (Touch Bending and more coming soon)

• Documented and an extremely clean code.

• Comes with a very clear documentation and API document.

But other than grass, as I mentioned above it also handles trees:

• Add any kind of an interaction to the trees on the terrain.

• Comes with a built-in “harvestable” tree instance script that works great.

• Super modular and can be extended.

• Integrated with UFPS, Photon Cloud, Photon Bolt, Forge Networking, UNet.

Pictures:


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I’m curious to try this out. Does this work with SpeedTree trees or only with Unity’s built-in Tree Creator?

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Any kind of a model which is usable on the terrain :slight_smile:
So yes :slight_smile:

Then I wouldn’t be opposed to giving it a try. We have quite a densely populated environment and I’m curious to see how it performs on our scenes.

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Awesome :slight_smile:
Make sure to send me a pm with the information above and i will add you :slight_smile:

I’m curious about the difference in lighting. Is that also part of your system?
I mean…the second image just looks much, much better. Less washed out from light. Or is that just due to a different scene with different lighting, etc?

[Edit]
Also, the above shot shows more than double the cpu time. Any explanation for that?

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Shouldnt be a difference in lighting probably because i took it at different times or something like that.
It could be caused by the system tho will check :slight_smile:

Noticed that as well - will take a look,
Thanks for mentioning that :slight_smile:

Elroi.

No more testers are needed, thanks for everyone!
Will be posting updates about new mechanics and features as i progress with the development!.

Elroi.

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Just purchased. I’m excited to give this a try and see how much of an increase in performance I’ll see. :slight_smile:

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Thanks for your purchase!
if you want to join the beta - message me with your skype :).

The current asset store version is outdated and it isnt uNature. (You will get free upgrade when i release it)

Doing some initial testing with uNature while working on development of my Wetlands Stamps Pack for Gaia. By turning on pooling on the six speedtree models I’m using and turning on the grass management on the thick bed of @turboscalpeur 's wetlands grasses from his HQ2 grasses pack, performance jumped from 20-30fps to 60-120fps on my crappy machine. Below is a screenshot of what pretty much the entire 2048x2048 terrain is filled.

Great job, Elroy! The addition of the grass management features that you are doing in addition to the pooling stuff is INCREDIBLE!

And yeah… there are cattails but no water. I do my stamps development in 5.1.0 to maintain max Gaia compatibility. Unfortunately, none of the water systems I own work that far back without shader errors other than base unity water (which SUCKS)… So I save adding water to when I do session imports into 5.3.4. With water my 20-30fps would have been closer to 10fps if even that. So I’m sure I’d still be getting at least 60fps with uNature and water. On my machine that is rock star speed… (I know, pretty sad… lol)

EDIT: Oh… Forgot to mention. Just adding uNature scripts, setting to force tree pooling on the tree models, and turning on grass management is the ONLY performance thing I did. Nothing with LODs or any other type of performance tweaking. This is just bare uNature with Speedtree Desktop Trees 2 and HQ Grasses 2 from turbo freshly imported.

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Thanks for sharing Shawn!!
Happy it works so well for you !

And that’s just the beggining, i didn’t even finish the grass management :wink:
So it will just get better :slight_smile:

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Some updates and new features announcements coming later today !

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AWESOME!!! :slight_smile:

A little update from the when i posted the original post -

  • Cool new editors to manage the system, for example the settings editor : Screenshot - 3c278b1f35d37f2dbb6f74cc131f785b - Gyazo You can design as many LODs for the grass as you like!
  • A custom uNature terrain data : Screenshot - b2c3f05a1153870cc81e6f43e203da58 - Gyazo The system will automatically create a “layer” on top of the original terrain data and give you custom settings you can edit regarding the system, the terrain data persists through each terrain like a normal terrain data.
  • TONS of bug fixing and improvments, both tree instances wise, and grass management wise. I made the system more generic so it fits on any terrain/ any shader, it works on any kind of a grass/ tree instance you put on the terrain. Grass management still isnt complete but the progress is amazing and it gets better and better!

Now for the interesting part, future plans! :

  • Integration with many other system - I am hoping in the future to integrate it with InfiniGRASS, VolumeGrass and more in order to allow grass management on not only unity terrain’s grass.
  • Different kind of demos - possibly rocks harvesting, free roam examples of the grass management and more!
  • More settings both in the terrain data, and settings editor.
  • Maybe integration for non-unity networking libraries, like photon-server and more.
  • Possibly add support for world-placed grass (very low priority atm)

Obviously there’s more, but i dont want to ruin the suprise ;).
I am super open to your suggestions and what do u think this asset should include!,
Please don’t be shy to tell me :slight_smile:

Elroi!

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Hi Elroi,

Fantastic asset this. Was wondering if it works well with Advanced Foliage System (top asset also). If not I would add it to the request/suggestions list if possible. :). Would also suggest have everything up and ready to be plugged straight into TC2, gaia, etc.

One thing I noticed when having a play with cryengine5 the foliage on the demo scene I tested was mixed with some of it affected by the wind and their neighbours not. It wasn’t really noticeable until you stop and study it. I imagine this takes some load off the system as well.

Edit - This was mainly on foilage meshes and not grasses and billboard types. At least not from what I can see.

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Thanks!

Actually, i looked at “Advanced Foilage System” today but didn’t have the chance to check it out, might do it tommorow and see how i can get it to work with the system :slight_smile:

Yes, the system will work out of the box with any terrain-based system, also streaming/multi-tiling is fully natively supported with no extensions needed :).

Yea thats true, will take a look at this as well :).

All sounds good to me. forst makes some really good assets. He also does the custom tree importer but I am not sure if there is some overlap in the tools contained in AFS. Either way he is one of the stores longest running devs from what I can see.

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Very impressive results. What will the final price be?