[Released] Vegetation Studio Pro

Other option I can think off is Nature Renderer.

There is also TerraWorld

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The fastest option i have tried so far that works on mobile as well is InfiniGrass, it seem is much faster in performance to anything that uses instancing, as instantiating every item individually seems to generally be much slower.

The next version seems to solve some of the current downsides, like easy planting of a larger terrain.
e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4_ee2EE9FA

Also seems will have a batched 3d impostor system, which will allow for many more options for LOD distances

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvs3zkPgua0

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do you know if it works with Vegetation Engine? ā€¦ i want the Vegetation Engine wind and fire and movement reaction stuff etc.

Just wanted to add the following video to the table!

TerraWorld is a node based level designer that comes with its built-in GPU Renderer to render millions of 3D models in scene efficiently which works in all Unity rendering pipelines (BIRP, URP & HDRP) and works with any custom materials and shaders without any setup and also comes with Player Interactions System which converts GPU Instances to normal prefabs around given targets (e.g. camera) for any interactions (e.g. physics, collisionsā€¦) along with its World Editing tools.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZThKAsSzAA

Download & Play: https://terraunity.com/community/topic/a-soul-hunter-in-the-mysterious-aokigahara-青ęœØćƒ¶åŽŸ-windows/

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Still using VSP, as long as itā€™s paid for and still works. There are other pretty good systems but none yet that works like VSP.
Latest video using VSP.

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Look into ā€œVSP-Beyondā€
You wont regret it

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Do you have a link? Nothing in the store called that.

So this is a bit of a pain, but here it goes:
1). Access the official discord for VS Pro
2) See this message for the discord link and info about VS Pro Beyond:
https://discord.com/channels/374537133584678913/462349035613847552/1128146656811024505

To Gain entry to the new discord server:
3) Download VSPro (yes again) but make sure youā€™re running 2022.3 when you download it, yes you need that version.
4) Thereā€™s instructions on how to make a SHA256 hash from the store download on the server welcome page.
5) You msg the discord bot with the hash, it opens up the rest of the channels.

You can message VMTB|Klani on the official discord channel for help.

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Great!
Thanks

Iā€™m so so glad someone else posted about this because Iā€™ve gone down a rabbit hole with this issue. So far I have narrowed it down to the below.

Iā€™m not using VSP but similarly, I use NR for my veg instancing. I also have TVE. This problem started for me when I tried to get amplify imposters to work. All I did was switch my 3rd LOD to the imposter and the rendering was totally off and I had a tree appear on my head in editor mode.

I abandoned the imposters and told myself I would look at it another time because NR is doing an OK job performance-wise so far. But I just had the same problem with a new tree pack without amplify. I investigated and sure enough the LOD3 for these new trees is a billboard. It seems that for a unity terrain instancing solution + TVE + a non-mesh LOD system youā€™re going to get rendering errors. Iā€™ll post again if I figure it out but right now this combo is a no go.

I should mention also that standard prefabs work fine so perhaps going the GPUI + TVE + Imposters system might work.

Curious if you or anyone has ever gotten further with any techniques like this? VSPro does not seem a viable solution for runtime generated foliage. I have hacked it a fair amount to get grass working well enough, but not trees. Iā€™m trying to incorporate Jimmyā€™s solution, but the scripting seems to have changed a bit, havenā€™t quite figured out how to fix the errors just yet.

Just in case this could be helpful to you, what we do to stream our terrains and trees in Kona II: Brume is as follows:

  • We author terrains using Unity terrain system
  • We place our trees and biomes using Vegetation Studio Pro
  • We then split and convert terrains to meshes
  • We then bake trees into GameObjects
  • We then pool our trees so that we only move the unused ones to the newly streamed locations

In the end, we get performance improvements from using our own culling solution alongside SRP Batcher over VSP instancing. Our trees use The Vegetation Engine shaders, which do great on all platforms.

This is the only method we found that did not create hiccups when loading asset bundles. Terrains have big overhead when loaded, so do VPS trees.

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[quote=ā€œalexandre-fiset, post:1413, topic: 706630, username:alexandre-fisetā€]
Just in case this could be helpful to youā€¦
[/quote]Great reply Alexandre, thank you. Iā€™m installing HDRP to try out the SRP Batcher, and assume I can find if not author a better culling solution as Iā€™ve long know that to be a problem with open-world games like mine running thousands of objects.

I do everything procedural and runtime, so I canā€™t bake/stream terrains, but have gotten them fine tuned to run decently in runtime. I handle Terrain-based trees and non-terrain objects in 128m^2 patches with as much threading and throttling as Unity allows, and again, itā€™s decent, but itā€™s still not great. The end result standing still FPS with a ton of Terrain-based trees and general GameObjects all checking culling and LODs is really the biggest bummer all around though.

Iā€™m considering now running just the biome/height math in and out of MapMagic 2 off-thread and using that to generate mesh terrains and move everything else to a pooled + SRP batcher engine. Unity has unfortunately been importing for two hours since I created and added a new HDRP asset =o=

edit: SRP Batcher is WAY better, like wow =o I ended up installing URP, HDRP wasnā€™t working for whatever reason, but Iā€™m still running 250+ fps with terrain + trees + bushes where Standard pipeline with basic GPU instancing was only like 80 fps with the same numbers.

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hat happened to this asset? My project uses thisā€¦

Itā€™s largely abandoned as the dev sort of moved on to other things and gave up (?), but a couple of community members are semi-officially supporting it. Look a few messages up and youā€™ll see a discord and instructions how to get access to it.

A couple other assets have started to fill the void, jason booth for example has ā€œFoliage Rendererā€ which does Instance Indirect rendering for vegetation.

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You canā€™t just leave an asset like this behind. I paid for it, and more importantly, my game depends on it. I spent months working on this asset for my game.

Anyway! Does anyone know why, when I set a prefab mode to Indirect Instanced, I get a lot worse draw calls and batches compared to Normal and Instanced mode? I also get better performance when itā€™s set to Normal than when itā€™s set to Instanced! Iā€™m using the default prefabs come with VS Pro.

Probably wasnā€™t making enough money working on it. So had no choice.