S. Krezel - Dynamic Tree & Plant Generator

[QUOTE=Slavq;645221]
@rabidworm333 Please go to the Edit > Project Settings > General Settings > Blueprints > Maximum Loop Iteration Count and change that to a higher number, e.g. by adding one ‘0’ at the end.
For FPS drop, please make sure that you have Billboard Manager placed in your scene. Do your trees turn into billboards when they’re far away, after starting Play in Standalone Window? If so, you can try to change billboard distance in the Billboard Manager. Does it happen also in the included ForestDemo map?
[/QUOTE]

Oh alright, the max loop iteration count fixed it! Thanks!

As for the FPS lag, I didn’t have the billboard manager set up properly - my bad.

Thanks again for this fantastic product!

Curious buyer here, was this product made to be a good replacement for that Speed Tree system that has a tree-monopoly among the game development world?

[QUOTE=rabidworm333;645272]
Oh alright, the max loop iteration count fixed it! Thanks!

As for the FPS lag, I didn’t have the billboard manager set up properly - my bad.

Thanks again for this fantastic product!
[/QUOTE]

How many trees did you placed down?
And whats different with billboard manager? What GFX card? 120fps max again?
Sorry, i am performance-sensible, so i would love to have more accurate numbers :smiley:

[QUOTE=Vata Raven;645366]
Curious buyer here, was this product made to be a good replacement for that Speed Tree system that has a tree-monopoly among the game development world?
[/QUOTE]

Hey, Speed Tree is a complex modeler with many hand-edit possibilities and this tool is a quick generator with many generation parameters & dynamic features. It’s not meant to be a replacement, rather a specific alternative, depending on your project needs. I made this because in my project I needed various dynamic trees & plants that can be created very quickly/easily inside UE editor. I don’t have enough manpower (I’m a solo dev, also working on other projects) to compete with SpeedTree in their years-of-experience well developed field :slight_smile:

[QUOTE=Tymax;645417]
How many trees did you placed down?
And whats different with billboard manager? What GFX card? 120fps max again?
Sorry, i am performance-sensible, so i would love to have more accurate numbers :smiley:
[/QUOTE]

Billboard manager is required to enable billboard generation - without it, all distant trees didn’t turn into billboards, hence his FPS drop.
If you seek for max performance, I would recommend using some regular static mesh trees, especially for large & dense woods. My dynamic trees are optimized in many ways, but the dynamic features still have their cost.

[QUOTE=Tymax;645417]
How many trees did you placed down?
And whats different with billboard manager? What GFX card? 120fps max again?
Sorry, i am performance-sensible, so i would love to have more accurate numbers :smiley:
[/QUOTE]

100-200 trees or so or so. GFX card is NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970, and I don’t remember the exact FPS but it was over 100.

[QUOTE=Slavq;645456]

Billboard manager is required to enable billboard generation - without it, all distant trees didn’t turn into billboards, hence his FPS drop.
If you seek for max performance, I would recommend using some regular static mesh trees, especially for large & dense woods. My dynamic trees are optimized in many ways, but the dynamic features still have their cost.
[/QUOTE]

Thanks for the honest reply! Is there a demo available so that i can check how it runs on some midrange systems of mine? I would never have more then 100 trees with a screensize > 0.1 in my viewport. By including the feedback of rabidworm333, this shouldnt be a problem at all. But i want to make sure a little more :slight_smile:

@Tymax
Hey, there is no demo yet, but I can give some reference point for now, I have a GTX 760 and when running around the demo scene (In the preview video, at around 3:45 minute) near ground (typical FPP perspective), I get a stable 75-80 FPS in HD res & max settings.

Hi Slavq. Love your tool. Just wondering if there is a quick tutorial to install custom Bark textures. Thanks

[QUOTE=Slavq;646930]
@Tymax
Hey, there is no demo yet, but I can give some reference point for now, I have a GTX 760 and when running around the demo scene (In the preview video, at around 3:45 minute) near ground (typical FPP perspective), I get a stable 75-80 FPS in HD res & max settings.
[/QUOTE]

Thanks for your reply, but i fear thats not enough. I evaluate assets on 2 different systems with completely different hardware to ensure that new assets wont handicap neither of them. Unfortunately this seems to be the case with alot of assets (specially cpu hungry assets/e.g. lots of collision).

@Winterstone Sure, the fastest way:
1. Import your textures (e.g. into the Textures\Bark\ folder)
2. In the Materials\Barks\ folder you can find all the included bark material instances. Copy one of them (Right click -> Duplicate) and then assign your textures to the Bark_Color, Bark_Normal & Bark_Roughness parameters.
3. Assign your newly created material to the ‘Bark Material’ parameter in your tree.
Please let me know if you need any further assistance. Thanks!

@Tymax Right now I’m working on a next update for this tool that will be focused on CPU usage optimization (it’s already optimized and relatively low, but I’ve figured out a new, better solutions for wind/shockwave/generation logic) - I’ll probably prepare a packaged .exe demo scene when I’m done. If you’re in hurry, please send me an email on contact@unknown-origins.com and we’ll figure it out.

Im not in a hurry, please dont worry too much about it :slight_smile:
Just sometimes it feels like i am the only person who cares about performance. If you look up how UE4 games actually run on various systems, you may start to puke. Its a mess. And whoever complains will mention that its because the game itself wasnt optimized … well yeah, thats my whole point :smiley:

[QUOTE=Slavq;648686]
@Winterstone Sure, the fastest way:
1. Import your textures (e.g. into the Textures\Bark\ folder)
2. In the Materials\Barks\ folder you can find all the included bark material instances. Copy one of them (Right click -> Duplicate) and then assign your textures to the Bark_Color, Bark_Normal & Bark_Roughness parameters.
3. Assign your newly created material to the ‘Bark Material’ parameter in your tree.
Please let me know if you need any further assistance. Thanks!

@Tymax Right now I’m working on a next update for this tool that will be focused on CPU usage optimization (it’s already optimized and relatively low, but I’ve figured out a new, better solutions for wind/shockwave/generation logic) - I’ll probably prepare a packaged .exe demo scene when I’m done. If you’re in hurry, please send me an email on contact@unknown-origins.com and we’ll figure it out.
[/QUOTE]

Thanks! I’ll try it out tonight!

-solved- thanks for the help!

For all that is holy and good in the world PLEASE make this have some element of multiplayer replication, such as the Conan Exiles UE4 trees. Would be a instant purchase!

How do you get collision, such as begin overlap? I can only get collision on the very bottom of the truck and no where else.

@JLBXB3 Trees should auto generate collision also for main branches, but they’re just for physics (set of capsule colliders set to respond only to physics to optimize them) - if you want to detect Begin Overlap events, you can just add e.g. a sphere collision component to the Tree blueprint and set it there. By default, trees have collision only for blocking physics actors/player/etc.

[QUOTE=Slavq;673093]
@JLBXB3 Trees should auto generate collision also for main branches, but they’re just for physics (set of capsule colliders set to respond only to physics to optimize them) - if you want to detect Begin Overlap events, you can just add e.g. a sphere collision component to the Tree blueprint and set it there. By default, trees have collision only for blocking physics actors/player/etc.
[/QUOTE]

Is there a way to generate an accurate collision, I’m using this in VR with motion controllers.

@JLBXB3 In the main InternalLogic\Tree blueprint there is a ‘Generate Colliders for Trunk’ function that adds capsule colliders. In the ‘Add Capsule Collision’ node you can set it to Visible and set your desired collision response. The trees generate simplified collision for performance reasons, but it can be quite accurate for main trunk and main branches, using capsules.
Same for branches, in the InternalLogic\Branch blueprint there are a few capsule collider components. They are placed along any branch automatically, you can also turn them Visible to see where they are and set their collision response. They are placed by the ‘Set Up Collision Capsules’ function which is executed from Tree -> AddBranches function. By default it’s not connected into execution chain, so if you wanta dynamic per-branch collision, you can plug this back in.

Hi @Slavq , very awsome ! However, I can’t find the growth stage option in any of the demo maps, did you remove it ?
cheers !!

[QUOTE=sab hammer;686989]
Hi @Slavq , very awsome ! However, I can’t find the growth stage option in any of the demo maps, did you remove it ?
cheers !!
[/QUOTE]

Glad that you like it!
The growth stage feature had to be removed due to severe UE bugs that broke the tool (It was fine before 4.12). Unfortunately, cutting out this feature was the only way to save the tool, since the growth stage feature was heavily based on the bugged mechanics. That’s why I’ve removed it from the feature list from 4.13+. If you need something like that really badly, you can try creating a few presets with different tree height, branch length, branch amount, leaf size, etc. that would correspond to different growth stages, and swap the preset when needed using blueprints… Just a rough idea.