The Visual Engine
○ 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!
○ About the upgrade
The Vegetation Engine was released 5 years ago and it got over 80 free major updates over the years. Due to the older design, once the asset and the modules started to grow, they were harder to maintain and to add new features. The Visual Engine is a new product, completely re-designed to be more extensible, more powerful, easier to use, and it comes with dozens of new features! Check out the comparison highlights and more details here!
○ 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.
Technical details
○ Features
✓ One-click and non-destructive Prefab conversion and reverting
✓ Automatic Mesh and Material conversion and Textures packing
✓ Advanced Material Manager tool to set the settings for all/selected prefabs at once
✓ Advanced Presets API for conversion or material setting which can be saved and reused
✓ Advanced Shader Manager to add Nature Renderer, Foliage Renderer, Flora, etc.. support
✓ Comprehensive Scene Debugger
✓ Book of the Dead demo scene included
✓ Element Shaders for detailing and customizing motion interaction, motion direction, wind power, tinting, overlay, wetness, cutout, emissive, subsurface and size fade (mesh, trails and particle support)
✓ GPU Instancing support for elements
○ Shaders
✓ Amplify Shader Editor graph included
✓ Subsurface/Subsurface/Simple Lit optimized shader models
✓ Layers to choose what elements affect the material
✓ Emissive maps support for all shaders
✓ Camera Proximity fade support
✓ Glancing Angle fade support
✓ Flutter Motion fade-out support
✓ Grass Motion highlights tinting support
✓ 3D Noise and Gradient Tint support
✓ Grass Perspective Correction when viewed from the top
✓ Grass Baked Pivots support for correct bending and interaction with large meshes
✓ Bark shaders with vertex paint and height-based blending support
✓ Vertex paint and height-based blending support
✓ Top/down projection and height-based blending support
✓ Deferred Subsurface approximation support!
✓ Forward high-quality transmission Subsurface support!
✓ Floating point world origin support
✓ Forward and Deferred support
✓ VR, Perspective, and Orthographic support
✓ SRP Batcher and DOTS Instancing support
✓ Opaque and Transparent render modes
✓ Default, Mirror, and Flip Normal modes (Identical to HDRP materials)
✓ Front, Back, and Double-Sided cull modes
✓ Alpha Cutout support
