A few questions
Does the grass shader handle wind the same way that unity grass does?
Will I be able to access and dynamically change grass wind settings to sync with my windzone constantly at runtime without it glitching?
Or is it synced to a windzone automatically?
I can do this with unity default and with AFS, and I don’t want to lose that.
How expensive is touch bending?
My grass distance is 80, and it is dense. I don’t want it flattened, just pushed around and bounced back.
The colliders being instantiated, I assume that supports all types of colliders, for example spherical colliders on trees?
Do the tags and layers get carried over as well?
I need to distinguish between different parts of my trees.
For unity trees, the billboard tilting to camera thing, is that still a problem in your implementation?
The grass wind is linked to a directional wind zone, but it has additional override controls for wind.
You can set a speed factor multiplier from the value you get from the windzone. In addition to this you can assign a texture for wind waves and set the size of the waves.
The touch bend is cheap. The cost is rendering the colliders or meshes that should affect the grass to a buffer that is used by the vertex shader of the grass. There is no problem having many objects affect it at the same time.
If you enable touch bend on rocks spawned and rendered by the system they are actually rendered using instancing to the buffer.
The flatten effect of the grass on the video was just to show posibilites. It was done using 4 trail renderer components on the wheels of the car. They had a material with a shader that can write to the touch buffer. Since the extruded mesh stays in the scene the grass will be kept flat.
If you want a walking character to affect the grass you can add colliders to his feet, (or use a complete ragdoll) add a TouchBendCollider component to the root and it will work. For a bit better effect I would scale off the size of the colliders a bit when rendering to touch buffer. The component has a setting for this.
I will try to make a video showing this in effect.
Here is colliders rendered to the buffer displayed with a debug mode.
The instantiated colliders support all collider types. There is a mode to read the original colliders from the tree/rock also. If you want a custom configuration. It is not 100% done yet but will be soon.
Default layer will be the layer you set the trees or rocks to render to, but I guess we can make an option override and read it from the prefab.
Setting the tag I never thought about, but no problem at all to include that. Tag could be set as the same as on the GameObject with the prefab.
I added it to the roadmap for 1.0 release. Roadmap is on the website.
The billboards has no camera tilting problems, works good in VR also. They are oriented towards the camera position not camera orientation.
Option for excluding sea level cells now working.
This could optimize culling and spawning time for scenes where you do not spawn rocks or maritime vegetation under water.
There is a 2 level culling for visible cells. The read area is potential visible cells if camera turns based on visible tree range without billboards. As camea changes position this is alos updated. Other colors are visible cells and LODs.
Tree billboards has a separate culling system on top of this and is not shown in the image
Unitys Occlusion Culling is also supported. Here you can see some of the cell areas are occluded by the terrain. This is done automatic based on the camera occlusion culling setting.
Yes … I use a Vegation Mask …and you can do that directly in Sentieri …when your great asset is installed, Sentieri can detect that and propone additional UI to drive the setting … soon I will record a video …
Hi Gang, I just wanted to show you what I have been capable to create with Vegetation System Beta, CTS, and Gaia.
In addition this scene is un-optimized and I am getting 50-60fps in a 4km square terrain.
Very nice! What are your computer specs, if you don’t mind sharing. I see all these great numbers but if they are super duper computers, I am concerned about what will happen when adding players, npcs, creatures, houses, etc., for people with average computers. What is your fps when using just Vegetation Studio without CTS?
First release will be terrain only, but the structure does work without the terrain. There will be no big problem adding mesh terrain support later. All rules for spawning will work except the rules using the terrain texture and splat map. “Do not grow grass on the road texture etc.”
I think anyone using mesh terrains (like gaia generates, or terrafirma) will probably have splat maps - as they’d need to be used to blend the textures. Might need to talk with the terrafirma guy to check how it works.
