Is Unity’s tree and grass system ever going to get an update, it seems very outdated and has some quite major bugs such as the ‘possessed trees’
What?
When you have a tall tree such as a pine tree, look up and walk towards or away the tree sort of ‘bends’
If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about, then that’s by design.
That’s an artifact of the billboarding system and can’t really be considered a “bug” since it’s working as intended. Increase the billboard start and/or the fade length.
–Eric
I suppose it may not be considered a bug, but the manner in which its executed is silly. I gather the angle of the trees in the sprites are calculated based on the cameras rotation, NOT on the location/angle of the camera relative to the actual position of that sprite tree. Yes this makes the budget of the sprite system low cause all they consider is the rotation of the camera, but it looks terrible. 
Edit: One thing that is also really needed, is the ability to have the sprite trees cast shadows. I can’t imagine that would be very hard to implement.
It’s pretty much unnoticeable if you increase the fade distance as I mentioned (the default is somewhat too small). All trees will cast shadows if you bake the lighting.
–Eric
Often baked lighting isnt a solution, especially for dynamic games(Day night cycle). I think we can all sit back and admit the Untys terrain editor is really dated, especially when compared to other terrain systems in the top engines.
I don’t mean to whine too much here, but I’m going to list a few things here that I think are crucial for this engine and should get immediate attention. I would bet most developers would agree with me…
-New tree sprite system for terrain.
-Dynamic shadows for terrain tree sprites
-Improved soft shadows in lighting.
-DYNAMIC GLOBAL ILLUMINATION! I don’t know if Unitys team is working on this yet, but this is the next crucial step in graphics. Cryengine did this for DX9, and it runs beautifully and looks awesome, and now Unreal has done it, and it looks even better than cryteks.
I could increase the list much further, but I think these things really should be the main focus in the graphics department. This is just my take, but I’ll bet most developers would agree on these.
I think we need more options than 1 bark shader and 1 foliage shader. They look pretty terrible everytime I’ve tried to use them. Also the tree generator would be great for really small plants like ground cover, except it simply cannot do it. It seems as simple as changing the minimum slider values from 1 to 0.1, but without source code you simply do not have an option. I agree this area could use some love.
I’m going to chime in here, since I’ve had a long love/hate relationship with the terrain and tree system.
The tree billboard “bowing down” has been an issue for a while. It’s been reported. A lot. Yes, it can be minimized by:
- Increasing the billboard range, so they are not as close.
- Using smaller trees.
These are not really solutions, as they limit your fps and restrict your tree models. Why the heck can’t there just get an option to lock the billboard to the Y axis? Is fixing the problem really that unreasonable?
I feel “working as intended” is a really poor excuse for your customers. I’m being diplomatic, I actually hear much worse in my head 
The terrain AND tree system have been neglected way too long. I had to roll my own, I’m using my own procedural mesh, with LODs. I’m using my own low detail trees, grass, everything. I HAD too, because UT has apparently lost the ability to work on its own core systems.
May I heartily recommend that, if UT ever DOES decide to do something about these systems…just do it in C#, and throw the code (with shaders) on the asset store. That way people can just modify it as they wish, instead of being locked out and having to just roll their own anyway, or being in limbo.
Ironically it was in C#, at least until fairly recently (I think 4.0), when they ported it to C++ for performance reasons. The shaders are and always have been available in the ‘Built-In Shaders’ package available on the full downloads page.
Not open-source, which is what you mean I think, but pretty easy to decompile and copy the code out + make your own changes to it.
hi there,
i hope that you do not mind some little advertising for my advanced foliage shaders.
but as they will give you a lot of the features requested i could not resist…:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/133398-Advanced-foliage-shader-released
and upcoming version finally will bring better billboarding for trees:
lars
I was just going to say “sounds like an asset store item” … and there it is - nice work lars, looking forward to the update.
thanks lypheus,
meanwhile you can give them a try:
http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2322017/afs_v2/afs_v2_touchbending/afs_v2_treeShader02/afs_v2_treeShader02.html
lars