The Visual Engine

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○ About the upgrade

The Vegetation Engine has been in development for the past 5 years, updated for free during all this time. The Visual Engine is a complete redesign of the Vegetation Engine shaders and systems and brings dozens of new features and improvements while keeping all the familiar workflows. Check the upgrade highlights in the release notes section!

○ Unity Awards 2020

The Visual Engine won second place at Unity Awards 2020 • Best Development Tool! Huge thanks to anyone for their support and feedback!

○ The Visual Engine

The Visual Engine is a set of next-level shaders and powerful tools designed to unify any asset from the Unity Asset Store, Megascans, Speedtree, Tree Creator, and more, or custom models made by your team.

Enable high-quality wind motion, interaction, local wind control, seasons, wetness, dynamic rain, advanced snow, subsurface scattering, layers for scans and moss, top projection, detail blending, gradient and variation tint, vertex occlusion, perspective correction, camera distance fade, glancing angle fade, crossfade, size fade, and more, for all vegetation assets and props with Standard, Universal, or HD Render Pipeline!

○ Advanced Systems

The Visual Engine comes with a one-click conversion workflow for 3rd party assets. Once converted, the assets are fully compatible with all features provided by the asset and will work in all render pipelines! The converter uses text-based presets with an easy-to-use but comprehensive API. One click, everything unified!

The Visual Engine comes with a comprehensive set of modular elements, used for motion and interaction with unlimited characters, local wind, dynamic seasons, global overlay (snow, sand, dust), wetness, tinting, size control, and leaves amount with minimal performance impact! The elements work with layers, so you can customize how each material is affected globally by each element used in the scene.

The Visual Engine includes an advanced Material Manager tool to set the settings for multiple materials or prefabs at once or save and apply presets. Use the Shader Manager to add support to the most popular instanced indirect renderer and use the Scene Debugger to check any aspect regarding rendering or shader settings!

○ Try the shaders

To get a glimpse of the shader features supported by the Visual Engine, download the Visual Engine Lite shaders for free from here! The Lite shaders support high-quality wind animation, snow overlay, layer and detail blending, vertex occlusion, gradient tinting, subsurface scattering, and emissive for the Standard, Universal, and HD Render Pipeline!

○ Community

With constant updates and improvements, all BOXOPHOBIC assets are trusted by tens of thousands of game developers. Feel free to join our discord server or get in touch via email if you need any help or if you want to discuss more advanced topics about the assets.

○ Compatibility

The Visual Engine supports the following Render Pipelines:

✓ Standard Render Pipeline 2021.3+

✓ Universal Render Pipeline 2021.3+ / 2022.3+ / 6000.0+

✓ HD Render Pipeline 2021.3+ / 2022.3+ / 6000.0+

The Vegetation Engine supports the following modules:

✓ The Visual Engine • Amplify Impostors Module

✓ The Visual Engine • Terrain Shaders Module

✓ The Visual Engine • Terrain Blanket Module

✓ The Visual Engine • Terrain Elements Module

The Visual Engine supports the following 3rd party tools:

✓ Amplify Shader Editor - Full shader editing support

✓ Foliage Renderer - Procedural Instancing support

✓ Nature Renderer - Procedural Instancing support

✓ GPU Instancer - Instanced Indirect support

✓ Flora 2.0 - Procedural Instancing support

✓ Vegetation Studio Pro - Instanced Indirect support

✓ Mega World Quadro Renderer - Procedural Instancing support

✓ Vladislav Tsurikov Instant Renderer - Procedural Instancing support

✓ DE Environment - Conversion for DE Environment

✓ Magio - Interactive Effect Engine support (by Arctibyte OAVA)

✓ Ignis - Interactive Fire System support (by Arctibyte OAVA)

✓ Game Creator - Actions for TVE control (by RVR)

✓ Enviro - Enviro to TVE control (by CatGamesStudio)

The Visual Engine supports vegetation created with the following tools:

✓ Speedtree - Profesional vegetation creation tool

✓ Broccoli Tree Creator - Powerful tree creation tool for the Unity

✓ Unity Tree Creator - Built-in Unity tree creation tool

✓ CTI - Advanced vegetation importer tool

✓ TreeIt - Free vegetation creation tool

✓ MTree (procedural setup) - Powerful tree creation tool for the Unity

The Visual Engine supports the following 3rd party vegetation assets:

✓ Any Asset - User setup or Automatic setup

✓ Quixel Megascans - All vegetation assets

✓ Synty Studios - Biomes Nature Packs

✓ Nature Manufacture - All vegetation assets

* Please note, with the Visual Engine's complete redesign, the old presets for supported assets are not yet updated! More presets are added in steps!

○ Limitations

🞫 TVE is not a placement tool, it is a vegetation unification/detailing tool

🞫 TVE is designed to work with instancing, static batching support is limited

🞫 TVE is expensive for mobile, using the simple lit shaders are recommended

🞫 Shader Model 4.5+ capable devices are required (Desktop / High-End Mobile)

🞫 Scalable Ambient Obscurance is not supported in Forward Rendering

🞫 Billboard Renderers from Speedtree7, Tree Creators, and CTI are not supported. Speedtree7 billboard faces are not supported!

🞫 Billboard shaders for VSP and GPUI will not work with the TVE features!

🞫 HDRP ray tracing and path tracing are not fully supported!

🞫 Only the latest LTS Unity versions are officially supported!

○ Disclaimers

⚑ The Visual Engine will not do a 1:1 conversion for the assets. Even if in most cases the converted prefabs will look similar to the original asset, depending on the original shaders, lighting can change, colors can change, various features could not work anymore and the wind animation will definitely be different. After conversion, material tweaks will be required!

⚑ This is not a vegetation placement tool, but it can be used together with your favorite tools supporting instanced indirect such as Vegetation Studio, Nature Renderer, GPU Instancer, Mega World, or other placement tools like Microverse, Gaia, Map Magic, Terra World, etc...

⚑ With the release of the Visual Engine, the Vegetation Engine will not be updated anymore, but it will get critical fixes for a limited time. If you purchased any of the modules and you need older versions compatible with the Vegetation Engine, feel free to contact me!