Tree Editor Bugs?

[Jingle-Fett]

Hi all, I’ve been playing around with Unity 3’s tree editor. I’m really happy with it and I’ve finally taken the time to make a good tree (along with some good custom textures) but as I worked on it I’ve noticed a few things. They might be my own mistakes or maybe they’re bugs, I’m hoping other people can confirm…
This is in Unity indie in case it matters btw.
(if these have been discussed before or if there’s a specific way we’re supposed to post bugs let me know, I don’t post here too often)

Things I’ve noticed so far:

-Trouble with changing and/or typing in values for different settings–click-dragging on the number seems to have problems with it not scrolling smoothly and clicking on it to type in a number seems to have problems too

-Flare radius seems to have a max value of 5–you can type in a higher value and it shows up but as soon as you click anywhere else it goes back to 5

-Branches sometimes are attached to the tree in places where there is no geometry. The spline appears to be floating but fortunately there’s no geometry visible so it doesn’t really cause any problems, but it’s something worth noting.

-(This one’s my biggest annoyance) any time you make changes to the materials it seems you have to refresh the tree. It’s not too bad (could be way worse) but it’s annoying having to refresh every time you make a micro-adjustment to one of the materials.

-If you try to change the tiling of a texture in a material that the tree uses, it accepts the changes made to the Y value but not X (I found that out when trying to make the tree look more detailed by changing the tiling, it’d scale up/down but not left/right)

Here’s a picture of the tree (not that it’s relevant, just to show it). On a side note, I highly recommend using normal maps on leaves, great results.

[shawn_1]

@Jingle Fett

Hi all, I’ve been playing around with Unity 3’s tree editor. I’m really happy with it…

Awesome!

@Jingle Fett

-Trouble with changing and/or typing in values for different settings–click-dragging on the number seems to have problems with it not scrolling smoothly and clicking on it to type in a number seems to have problems too

Known bug.

@Jingle Fett

-Flare radius seems to have a max value of 5–you can type in a higher value and it shows up but as soon as you click anywhere else it goes back to 5

I believe this was just an arbitrary clamp set. I’m not sure if there was a good reason for it or not. I’ll look into having it increased.

@Jingle Fett

-Branches sometimes are attached to the tree in places where there is no geometry. The spline appears to be floating but fortunately there’s no geometry visible so it doesn’t really cause any problems, but it’s something worth noting.

This should only happen if you have a Break Chance set to greater than 0. If that’s the case then this is by design. Not a good idea to reshuffle branches around just because you’re changing wether or not the branch is broken.

@Jingle Fett

-(This one’s my biggest annoyance) any time you make changes to the materials it seems you have to refresh the tree. It’s not too bad (could be way worse) but it’s annoying having to refresh every time you make a micro-adjustment to one of the materials.

Agreed. We’re looking into finding a better solution.

@Jingle Fett

-If you try to change the tiling of a texture in a material that the tree uses, it accepts the changes made to the Y value but not X (I found that out when trying to make the tree look more detailed by changing the tiling, it’d scale up/down but not left/right)

Please file a bug report and give me the case number.

Thanks for the feedback.

[anon_42117051]

Unrelated, but I’ve worked with SpeedTree in other game engines in the past, and I giggled like a schoolgirl when I saw Unity’s new tree editor show up in version 3. Apart from the LoD system being a bit fruity at times, it’s amazing how much you guys have managed to do here and you can create some really nice-looking trees with some effort. It’s better, faster, and a whole lot simpler than SpeedTree for creating low-poly models. Might be a bit rough around the edges, but it’s a lot more practical than the systems I’ve worked with in the past and you don’t need to sell your family into slavery to afford some crazy-ass $15k+ license.

[anon_5978479]

I too have been entrenched in the Tree Creator and it is really an amazing tool.
I’ve had luck fixing the floating branches by giving the tree a higher LOD setting
this works about 70% of the time and I find it happens more often when I have manually edited the branches

//Additional Bug
Painted Trees are not affected by wind - so we have to place them manually it we want wind but (and tell me if Im wrong) then we lose all the great LOD features like billboarding etc.

Related Topic:
could we possibly get an elaboration on the process of the optimized materials that are generated?
How and when they appear, how they override our materials etc.

[Jingle-Fett]

@ Shawn
Thanks for the response! I haven’t done it before except for when Unity has crashes and the popup shows up, how do I file a bug report?

Related Topic:
could we possibly get an elaboration on the process of the optimized materials that are generated?
How and when they appear, how they override our materials etc.

I’m a little curious about this too, understanding that might help us understand how the whole thing works, make it easier for us to tell if something is a bug or just how it works

[duke_1]

My main beef is the UV packing. I was working on bamboo, and it gave 50% of the texture sheet to the branch texture and the 2 leaf clumps got about 15% each! I was expecting it to normalize by relative world space or something.

[shawn_1]

@Jingle Fett

Thanks for the response! I haven’t done it before except for when Unity has crashes and the popup shows up, how do I file a bug report?

Help → Report a Bug

[shawn_1]

@anon_5978479

could we possibly get an elaboration on the process of the optimized materials that are generated?
How and when they appear, how they override our materials etc.

@Jingle Fett

I’m a little curious about this too, understanding that might help us understand how the whole thing works, make it easier for us to tell if something is a bug or just how it works

I’ll see if we can put together some better documentation on exactly what’s happening with the optimized shader materials.

[Khyrid]

Necroing this thread due to relevance.

I cannot for the life of me change the textures on my trees. Once the texture is applied it’s permanent. I have changed the material to the new texture and applied it to the tree but it still renders the old texture. I had a similar problem with another tree where the far away lod used an old texture and only the close up lod used the new texture. I’m about to abandon the tree constructor entirely.

I’m using unity indie.

I have refreshed the tree and texture files = no effect.

I have restarted unity = no effect.

I have changed the material to regular diffuse so that the tree object had to convert it to a tree material again, this used to work but now = no effect.