Hello! The announcement of a dedicated team for terrain is the most exciting in a long time.
What is the roadmap thinking around trees, especially with respect to performance for demanding scenarios like VR? You can see some existing community feedback in my earlier thread here . The short version of the story is: Unity trees perform OK but look terrible. The SpeedTree integration was an exciting development but never seemed to reach any kind of reasonable quality bar: the main problem being that performance is awful.
Now that you guys are dedicated to these problems, have you given the issue of trees any thought yet? Would be very interested to know where you’re headed.
For speedtree you need to optimize the lods yourself. Turn off shadows at distance billboards sooner… that kind of stuff. It’s fine even in MASSIVE numbers that way. I had over 30k on a 15k x 15k terrain. Only thing g that caused fps drop was my buildings ironically.
I’ve had similar success in desktop builds targeting 60fps, but never get even close with VR builds that need a solid 72 or 90hz. In particular, speedtrees up close are killers, in spite of my best efforts inside of the SpeedTree editor to greatly simplify them. Have you had success with these massive numbers of speed trees in VR?
I literally have had zero issue with them once I set them up properly. Its true out of the box they are setup up quite stupidly. Note* I do run my editor on Maximum…(which I do realize is absurd, since the editor suffers from a serious case of clock gluttony [god forbid it run off the GPU in edit mode too…]) So that should also give you a good idea of how much better this help it perform.
Yeah, I’m familiar with that already. I even went so far as to customize the speedtree shaders to simplify them by removing features I don’t need. It never got fast enough for VR. I’ll have to check again under 2018.3.
But as for the original topic of this thread, is there any info yet about the roadmap for trees and vegetation from the new dedicated Unity terrain team?
If you’re interested in 3rd-party solutions, check out Vegetation Studio / Vegetation Studio Pro. It really can speed up your vegetation rendering/culling/billboarding, also it supports interaction if you are interested in such things (like chopping off trees, etc).