Congrats to Adam Goodrich for making excellent use of SpeedTree for Unity in a picture named Image of the Day twice at GameDev.net, on December 31, 2014 and January 8, 2015.
The winning image was selected by a vote among members of the GameDev.net community:
Watch the scene that Adam created in this video . . .
Adam, a SpeedTree for Unity 5 Beta user based in Sydney, Australia, maintains websites at https://twitter.com/AdamGoodrich and http://about.me/adamgoodrich. We asked Adam for a few words about his experiences with SpeedTree. He replied . . .
As a tech guy, Unity hobbyist and avid nature lover I have always had a fascination with creating interesting and rich natural environments. I just love the gorgeous environments in today’s AAA games but never considered myself talented enough to create them myself. I did wonder if maybe I could create some software to do this for me…
Fast forward a few years and here are some of the results. This scene is part of a 2km x 2km world and was created from start to finish in about four hours. It could have been done faster but most of that was spent having fun tweaking and playing. In fact I did two scenes on the same base to explore how radically different you could make the same place feel just by the way you dressed it up.
In this scene the terrain was generated procedurally, and then the environment created on top of this – it’s a fusion of fractal maths and art. The ground consists of just two textures, and all but one tree are SpeedTrees.
One of the key ingredients to bringing an environment to life is the vegetation. I have done a lot of research in the space and have long looked enviously at SpeedTree for UE4, and wished it was available for Unity.
It was a very pleasant surprise when it was announced with Unity 5, and was the kicker for me to invest in Unity 5. Literally the first thing I did was to get the free SpeedTree Model Bundle and create a test scene and video of it. I was immediately hooked.
SpeedTree is as easy to use as the standard Unity tree system, but more interesting in its behavior, richer to look at, and simple to extend and customize via the modeler. It is far and away the most gorgeous vegetation for Unity IMHO.
My intention is to bring my Procedural Worlds generation tools to the Unity Asset store and community in the next few months. It will enable even novices to create gorgeous environments like this – and it will be SpeedTree ready out of the box.
– Adam Goodrich