A forest is an essential part of landscape. Usually trees are very close to each other in the forest. So close that there is virtually no space between adjacent trees.
In computer games, if we try to create a really dense wood it will cause significant FPS drop.
This is especially true for games where the player can rise to a considerable height and see the forest stretching to the horizon. In this case the frame can contain millions of trees. With the standard approach, computer game designers have to reduce the density of the forest to increase FPS. That usually looks unrealistic.
âTexture Forestâ technology allows you to draw dense forest without reducing FPS. It involves the use of multiple texture layers which show the relevant sections of the forest.
âTexture Forestâ technology works fast enough even on weak machines, though looking realistic.
This asset contains Editor Extension, special Shader and a few sets of textures to create the Texture Forest on a Standard Unity Terrain. The shader uses model 2.0 so it will work on mostly any Android tablet.
Thanks for documentation. What Iâve seen so far from this asset has me believing it would work well in a flight simulator. My test project now is to produce a smooth transition from Texture Forest trees when flying to SpeedTrees when landing and then walking. Iâll let you know how it goes.
Tinjan, this technology was designed from the very beginning especially for flight simulators. Itâs very interesting for me how do you use it and what are the results. Maybe you can post some screenshots?
Iâm also interested in ways to neatly transition this to regular trees. I think especially the edges of the forest are going to be tricky to transition.
Yes, now lighting is baked into the texture set. I donât have a clear idea how to process a realtime lighting for such an object. And, of course, it will decrease the performance. Very soon Iâll publish the Texture Forest Studio. It is my editor for Texture Forest. It support lighting. You could change an ambient and one directional light source.
This is a tropical texture forest from IL-2 Sturmovik - Hawaii. I donât know how realistic it is. Frankly speaking I have not made my own tropical forest yet but I think itâs not difficult.
Yes, It will be separate asset because I think that it can be used not only for Unity engine but for any engine in which you want to use texture forest. If somebody already has his own flight sim engine he can install free Unity Editor and Texture Forest Studio and so he can generate Texture Forest sets for his sim.
Hello,
I was wondering if the the result of your operation is a regular mesh?
What controls do we have over the generated mesh?
Also, Can we easily use the âTexture Forest Studioâ to prepare forest textures to be used in FPS perspective? Can you show an example of the process (screenshots or video)
Can âTexture Forest Studioâ alone can generate custom textures and the generate the mesh? or do we need both âTexture Forestâ and âTexture Forest Studioâ for a complete package?
You are right. The result of operation is regular mesh. The special shader just removes some artefacts which occurs when the direction of view is perpendicular to normal of the terrain surface. You can change this shader on simple alpha blend and look what happens.
During mesh generation you can change the distance between texture layers and the size of each cell of forest mesh in terrain height map. You can scale the forest using texture scale coefficients in terrain settings.
Right now I am preparing TF Studio documentation. It will be ready very soon.
Texture Forest Studio can generate textures only. For complete package you need both assets. I received many questions from people who doesnât use Unity engine in realtime, just texture set. So, I decided to separate assets on two parts.
