Benefits
Import manually modeled trees from Maya, 3ds Max, Modo or Blender and let them get adjusted to be compatible with unity's tree creator shaders and directional and radial wind zones or create smoothly fading LOD groups using custom shaders which also support physically based lighting.
Add your trees using the terrain engine to benefit from billboarding or place them as independent game objects.
(Shaders need Shader Model 3.0).
Requirements
Please do not expect the custom tree importer to simply make any tree just work: You will have to spend some time tweaking your model.
First and foremost the custom tree importer needs trees to be imported as nested, hierarchical objects.
You also should be quite familiar with your 3D app and do have a basic understanding of the tree creator and things like "main wind", "main turbulence" and "edge turbulence".
The custom tree importer script works as asset postprocessor. It combines all submeshes into one and adds the needed vertex colors and uvs.
Bending
Adjust bending on each level of your tree using control tags which let you specify its reaction to main wind, main and edge turbulence to create convincing and lively bending trees.
Advanced rendering and LOD groups
Trees imported using the custom tree importer are fully compatible with the built in tree creator shaders and also any tree shader based on those.
Furthermore this package ships wit a bunch of shaders which will give you physically based shading and enable you to create smooth fading LOD groups including several mesh instances as well as real time lit billboards – all physically based shaded.
Hierarchical setup of the tree
In order to be able to calculate main wind and main turbulence for the trunk, the branches and leaf planes the importer script has to know about the different parts of the tree and their origins.
For this reason you will have to provide trees as nested, hierarchical objects like shown on the screen shots below.
