Massive Vegetation is a fully featured, ultra high performance billboard creation system that allows rendering millions of trees, grass, leaves or plants in real time, even with low to mid-range hardware. The creation tools included are extremely quick and user friendly, and allow creating huge amounts of billboards in a matter of seconds.
Features:
- Ultra-high-performance billboard rendering system
- Visual editing tools, integrated in Unity’s Editor and Sprite Editor
- Support for hundreds, thousands or millions of billboards in your real-time scenes
- Interactive Actor System: grass/vegetation interacts in realtime with objects/characters as they walk by
- Fully compatible with Unity’s prefabs, to re-use vegetation assets anywhere
- Manual or automatic creation mode, including texture distributtion pattern, height filters, randomization and more...
- Full local control of billboard’s position, size and rendering parameters, including the new feature Adaptive Verticality, to improve how the billboards look from above
- Automatic planting of billboards on the ground, or on top of any collider (not only terrains), with customizable layer masks
- Automatic randomization of size, type and billboard flipping, to create more natural environments
- Fully compatible with Unity’s forward rendering pipeline, including dynamic shadows, multiple lights and fog
- Compatible with deferred rendering (as a forward rendering post-pass)
- Complex lighting and transparency algorithms, including Alpha To Coverage, Ambient Occlusion and Spherical Harmonics.
- Automatic Frustum and Distance culling to dramatically improve performance, and allow creating huge, open-world environments
- Two billboard rotation modes included, to improve results on VR applications
- Wind Animation included
- Several Sprite Sheets with ready-to-use trees, grass and plants
- Automatic creation of Colliders, to add physics collisions to trees and plants
- Multiple object editing supported
- All-included, single price, no extra packages with additional charges
- Full source code included
Requirements & supported platforms:
- Requires Shader Model 4.0
- Supported on DX11+, OpenGL 3.2+, OpenGL ES 3.1+AEP, Vulkan, PS4/XB1 consoles.
- Not supported on WebGL, DX 9.x (WinPhone), OpenGL ES 2.0/3.0/3.1, Metal.
The starting point of Massive Vegetation is a component you add to any game GameObject. It takes care of creating, configuring and rendering Billboards for you, according to the parameters you provide. Also, the custom editors provided perfectly integrate with Unity’s built-in editor so you can create things manually or fine tune everything.
Because Massive Vegetation (from now MV) is based on Billboards or impostors, it’s especially suitable for scenes where a huge amount of trees/plants are needed or when performance is a critic factor.
Although it’s indeed possible to get very appealing visual results, MV is not designed to provide high-fidelity, close-up images of trees. In such scenarios, a 3D representation would probably do better than billboards. But again, if the amount of elements is too high or if performance is your top priority, Massive Vegetation is the way to go.