Don’t limit your library to a handful of trees when your library can be unlimited! As you can see, you’re not just getting trees, but grass, flowers, bushes and ferns as well!
Added 4 new texture sets to increase the number of trees available, added in a rename tool, and most importantly a Collapse Mesh tool so that you can easily convert MFV trees into Gaia and Veg Studio compatible assets!
New updates for MFV.
I spent a little time and made a collapse tool that will allow you to easily transform whatever you create into a terrain ready asset, complete with an LOD Group!
The tool will also analyze your asset and let you know how many vertices it currently contain.
One of the great things about MFV is that creating new trees is so easy. Whatever you make, you immediately have 2 additional versions of it without any extra overhead.
Take your tree, load up the Switch Mesh tool, and choose between your 3 different options!
Finally, this latest update contains 4 new textures derived directly from my game currently in development. I needed trees and vegetation that had a little more saturated colors and unique looking plant species, so a little bit of time in Photoshop and I had what I needed. I was so happy with it, I felt it was worth adding to the core MFV package.
In this situation, I wanted to present a very challenging ascent for the player to get a gem. I was very easily able to reposition branches and leaves as I needed.
Remember, even though this tree has been changed from its prefab, there is zero hit to the actual draw calls.
Here is another example from the same level, using the same material ( Still only 2 draw calls!), but a completely different looking tree. I had the ability to easily move limbs around to create the feeling as if these planks naturally followed the structure of the tree. Before I built and then used MFV in this project I was stuck making the planks fit to what the trees had to offer me, which wasn’t much.
Here you can see how well I was able to craft this path for the planks right over and through the tree tops. There was a lot of manipulation required of my trees in order to make this path feel natural but also designed for the players experience.
Tinkering with the idea of adding in an extra source mesh that would allow you to quadruple the amount of trees/vegetation you will get from the same 2 draw calls.
As it stands right now, you get 2 draw calls by using a single texture/material on your trees. So for ex., if you use the Autumn1 Material, an unlimited amount of MFV assets can be added to your scene that use that material. If you add in a tree that uses Summer1 Material, you’ve lost that highly optimized 2 draw call threshold. – Of course because of how MFV is designed, even adding in that extra material you only add in a single extra draw call!
However, with what I’m considering for this next update, you will be able to include all the assets from 4 different textures ( for ex. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter) and maintain those 2 draw calls.
So my initial tests show that this might be too much of a texture optimization, especially for the ground cover objects. But, I might still add it in, just as a super optimization.
As you can see above, I have all 4 seasons of the asset collection displayed onscreen with only 2 draw calls being rendered. This means that you can have a ridiculous amount of vegetation displayed with virtually no draw call cost at all.
There is a small hit, texture quality-wise on this combined asset group, especially when it comes to the ground vegetation…
Notice in the image above, you have the Version number, and the Combined number. There are 4 combined versions to choose from, and 3 versions of each of those. Looking at it now, I’m probably going to change up the language a bit to make it clearer, but hopefully you can still understand what is going on here.
Below you see that I changed the Combined version to 2, and then run through each of the 3 varieties.
MFV 1.3 is live
I decided to change up the names a little to make it easier to understand.
Seasonal Version is the 4 options you have from me collapsing the 4 seasonal textures into one.
The Variety number is the same 3 options you for each seasonal selection.
I also updated the Menu to include both the new Seasonal versions, and the original. Honestly, I don’t see many people using the Original version anymore and will probably remove it at some point.
Why choose to build and create vegetation that only has 3 visual options when you can have 12?
I can tell you one thing, I don’t foresee me quadrupling these options again. That would mean instead of a single texture having 4 in one, it would be 16 in one with 48 total visual options. While that would be ridiculous, the texture quality on the ground cover pieces would be horrible.
Working now on updating ForestVision to be more in line with the structure of Mobile ForestVision, but since it isn’t geared towards being mobile friendly, I think I will focus more on species of vegetation.
For example there might be an entire texture devoted to one species of conifer, say spruce. Then you will get the ability to switch between 3 versions of that spruce tree.
Anywho, just somethings I’m bouncing around
