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Under review

Billboards not instancing?

itsflorian 6 years ago updated by Aaron Brown 6 years ago 5

Hey, 


I've got a terrain with 10000 trees. Converted the trees and scene to LushLOD Trees. Deleted the original trees. Everything works great except --


I'm getting crazy amount of Set Passes. 22000 with LushLOD Trees Vs 67 with Unity terrain trees and billboards. The billboards are set at the same distance in both cases.


I know LushLOD is drawing from the Atlas because when I modify the atlas.png, the changes show up on the screen.


So why so many set passes? 



That's a lot of set passes. It could be any number of things causing it. Best way to track it down is to compare your settings with the settings in the demo scene until you find what the difference is... I'm pretty sure the demo scene doesn't have that many set passes. One thing to be aware of is that the demo scene is using baked shadows, so there aren't additional passes needed for shadow rendering in the demo scene. So unless you are also baking your shadows, you'll be hard pressed to get the same speed that's seen in the demo scene.

Hey, thanks for the quick answer and great asset (especially the documentation). I was certain I got the same results without shadows, but after a restart I'm back down to a very good 160 set passes with LushLOD.


A couple more questions. It might defeat the purpose of the asset, but I'm only using it to be modify the billboard atlas.


- Is there a way to remove the transition between HQ and billboards?

- Can we get HQ trees shadows ONLY?




Under review

Your asking to remove the transition between HQ and billboards, is that because you want to see HQ trees only, and turn the billboards off? Or is that becuase you want to see billboards only, and turn HQ trees of? Both options are possible I'm just not sure which option you're wanting. :)


As for HQ shadows only... yea that option is possible but it's gonna be expensive. I don't actually think they're is a way to have only billboards for the meshes, but with only the HQ shadows. I never figured anyone would want billboards with HQ mesh shadows. But if you are wanting only the HQ trees, with only the HQ shadows, then well, yea you can have that too, most of the LushLOD features would be turned off in that case. Let me know more specifically what you're trying to do and I'll be able to give a more specific answer.

Hey, thanks again for the great support. 


Basically the idea is to get LushLOD to behave just like the standard Unity trees on a terrain. 


- HQ trees have realtime shadows

- Billboards have no shadows

- Trees go straight from HQ (close to camera) to Billboard (far from distance). No transition where both blend together. 


Again, it seems counterintuitive because from what I understand you built the asset to avoid these settings - but after playing with for a bit, I'd love to be able to get these options and still edit the billboard atlas.

I did design a means to edit the billboard atlas... but it requires you to make the changes to the HQ trees, and then convert them again, and then upgrade your scene to use the new trees (there is an upgrade button to make it easier). All that's in the documentation though so I assume you know about this. if you're wanting to edit the billboard atlas so that it significantly doesn't match the HQ trees anymore, and then you want to turn off the transitions, that would look really bad, but it's not too hard to do. You'd just edit the LushLODTrees.cs file, and tell it to do the entire transition instantly, instead of gradually. All the code for the transition is calculated in the function that's at the bottom of that file. It also transitions the shadows separately... and you could remove all the shadow transition code to make it keep showing the HQ shadows always. It will look really bad though, I guess you probably already know that.