I’m not sure I chose the right topic to ask the question.
I created a project to use some basic Unity features and understand how it works. It’s very informative and I think more useful than spending 2 weeks reading tutorials and remembering only a tenth.
I created a tree with some branches and leaves. However, I found that even though the leaf image has a quite classic look, it doesn’t render fully and has straight edges instead of rounded ones. Here are some pictures below. Do you see a mistake I made?
It looks like you need to either enable “Alpha Clipping” on the Material or set the surface type to “Transparent” on the leaf material. (Alpha Clipping will have a coarser edge but might be faster on desktop GPUs). Also make sure the texture import settings have the alpha source set and “Alpha is Transparency” turned on.
There is also an issue with the leaves not moving at all realistically. Indeed, with the wind the base of the leaf moves including the part which should be connected to the tree.
Ah, that’s not using the standard shader so I’m not sure. It looks like the texture in bringing in the alpha correctly from the thumbnail. Try changing that “Alpha Cutoff” parameter to 0.5 or lower and see if the outline changes.
You might also want to see if it works better with the Standard Lit shader just for comparison. No idea about the motion, that’s usually all handled in the vertex shader.
I try some values for “Alpha Cutoff” beetween 0.1 and 0.5, but the 2 problems have not disappeared.
I downloaded trees available for free on a website and they are all displayed correctly. However, I found while exploring the downloaded files, that creating a tree seems much more complicated than I imagined. There are many different images, many adjustments made. About me, I had almost left all the default values.
Creating a tree seems too complicated for someone new to Unity.
I think it’s best that I start with more basic things such as creating rocky paths and discovering all possible terrain modifications, slightly modifying fully parameterized trees, creating and modifying cubes and other shapes.
Another alternative is to skip Unity’s tree creator thing and just model your trees in a 3D modelling app like Blender. Then just place them around your scene as regular static GameObjects. You don’t have terrain features like wind zones or automatic bill-boarding, but it’s simpler to set-up.
Or just get trees off the Asset Store. A tree is a tree mostly, unless you are going for some unusual art style. For all I know, Skyrim, the Witcher 3 and GTA 5 might all share the exact same stock tree model somewhere. I wouldn’t have noticed if they did. It’s pretty rare that a game is praised for it’s beautiful bespoke trees (though The Witness is one such game).
I think that u have a JPG format which does not support alpha clipping… Try the png format … Idk what art style u want for your game but we don’t use single leaf images for games as u might require thousands of them to make the tree look believable and it might not be performant… So use leaf clusters… u can read about it here if u want European Forest Environment in Unity — Experience points … If your texture and material is correct can u give the screenshot of your leaf settings in the tree editor??
Tree Creator is kinda old and not being maintained and supported.
The easiest way (and honestly cheapest if you value your time) is just to buy some assets with trees you like; eg SeedMeshStudios or Nature Manufacture. If you go looking, there’s also a few free trees out there. You can make your own with newer tools like https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/modeling/mtree-tree-creation-132433
If you have the resources for it, SpeedTree seems to be the preferred way for large studios, but it gets really expensive really fast. Or you can get cracking in Maya/Blender/whatever and make your own that way, but getting it to interact nicely with wind and other stuff is going to require some work (vertex painting, then writing custom shaders or using somethng like Vegetation Engine to import it and Vegetation Studio Pro to deal with rendering many instances)
I downloaded a free asset and it works, thank you. Indeed I think it’s a waste of time to try to create a tree myself when there are many fully functional models.
For information, it’s a PNG image.
Using Unity seems so complicated, there are so many elements and settings for each one. But I’m starting to get used to it a bit…
