thanks bigkahuna,
i will try to work out things more clearly, add more tips and steps over the next days and bring up a demo project to the asset store.
I know that this isnt really reply on tutorial but i would strongly suggest “newer” technic for modeling of plants, which is high poly modeling.
Basically you start with high poly plant in Mudbox, Zbrush or Sculptris and then bake normals on altas. Then you paint over it for difuse texture and specular. The main thing that results are 10 times better than Unity tree creator, and at least 5 times more optimised if you keep things well. If you have dense vegetation in game overall visual results and performance results are vastly better.
I will post tutorial for this technic as soon as possible .
i am pretty sure that almost everybody would like to create trees with any kind of external editor like those you have mentioned.
but unfortunately, it is not possible to use the advanced tree creator shaders on any imported geometry [at leat not if you would like to use bending and windzones].
so you would have to use the old fashioned soft occlusion tree shaders which means:
no real time shadows on the bark nor leaves
no bump mapping or spec lighting on the bark
no bump mapping, no translucency and no spec lighting on the leaves
i am not aware of anybody having ported the advanced shaders so they could be used on imported models.
lars
btw.: did you look at the tutorial? does not seem so…
But it pisses me, that exactly this should be done by Unity Team when they first released tree creator. Not let people to spent more than 3/4 year to find out, how to use it. Whole Unity documentation quality is going from “terribly suck” to “non existent”.
They implement quite potent tool, but they tell nobody how to use it and what it can do. So majority of people just ignored it, until few people after cca 1/2 year found out, that this tool is actually quite good and it can deliver very good results, if you know HOW. But they had to spent many hours by trying and guessing how it works. Only because some stupid Unity manager decided, that writing few pages of documentation is expensive.
OMG. You are best customer ever! They shit on your head and you love it…
When i buy some tool, i want to have documentation, to exactly know, how to use it correctly. To not waste hundreds of hours by experimenting. And do you know why? Time is money. Every serious company understands that and provide good documention for their products. I cant imagine Autodesk to not providing any help for their 3dsmax and telling customers “find way how to use it, it is up to you”
Only reason why this attitude works for Unity is that majority of users are cheapskates and kids, who dont want to buy anything and they dont value their time. And they dont understand, that they are customers, so they deserve support and documentation. I dont doubt, that AAA companies have excellent support and documentation from Unity team.
Unity team changed a lot, whole effort is now going for supporting big companies and small customers like pro users are meant to buy and shut up.
Haha. Oh by the way that is 90% of Unity custumers, until they want to really use all features in engine and make something decent from a game, then they found out deep secrets.
True.On the first sight everything is OK, but once you are doing serious game and go little bit deeper, then there is lots of surprises. You are going through features and it is same story all around: Not documented, bugged, not documented, sloooooow, bugged, not documented, idiotic architecture…
@kristof: there is no manual mode whatever…
just adding 1 bark material to the trunk and all branches and adding 4 different leaves groups as meshes all sharing the same texture would end up in a texture atlas shown in the tutorial: an atlas which is just divided into 2 halfs.
you would have to manually uv-map the leave meshes in your 3d app. you can’t do this in unity.
I have just added a section which explains how to get around the limitation of a very simple trunk geometry when working on rather thin trees whose trunk has a radius below 0.5.
