Flora 2022

Complete Instancing and Placement Solution

Flora is a robust and efficient instancing rendering system designed for Unity 2021.3 and later, enabling you to enhance environments with vast amounts of vegetation and instances without compromising performance.

• Documentation
• Discord
• Support Forum
• Roadmap

Key Features

• Terrain Support: Fully supports instancing terrain details and trees, ensuring smooth integration and batching with other instances. Background loading of terrain foliage using Burst jobs eliminates performance hitches.
• Instance Painting: Easily paint instances on any mesh surface. Instances are grouped by a global grid and added as children of the surface, allowing for easy management. Populate your scenes with detailed vegetation and objects effortlessly.
• Prefab Support: Manage and customize foliage-covered prefabs with ease. Create complex prefabs, such as overgrown buildings or detailed vegetation patches, to introduce variation into any scene.
• Performance: Flora 2.0 is rebuilt with performance as the top priority. Features include zero frame GCAllocs, Burst optimized jobs for uploading and culling, a modern GPU resident scene, dual-phase culling, and on-demand GPU streaming to maintain high performance and low GPU memory usage in complex scenes.

Rendering and Performance

• Pipeline Compatibility: Works with any render pipeline, including Built-in or custom.
• Modern Indirect Rendering: Utilizes DX11, DX12, Vulkan, Metal, and modern console APIs.
• Advanced GPU Scene Management: Employs a single buffer system, burst-mapped uploads, SOA layout, dynamically resizing buffers, and packed GPU transforms.
• Full Terrain Support: Dynamically loads terrain detail and tree cells in the background using jobs.
• Dual-Phase Culling: Combines Burst Jobs with GPU culling to reduce GPU load.
• GPU Occlusion Culling: Implements an extremely performant Hi-Z occlusion system.
• CPU Occlusion Culling: Supports Unity's baked occlusion system for lower-end platforms.
• Dynamic Density: Adjust instance density dynamically based on distance with a customizable falloff.
• Global Density: Adjust instance density for the entire scene with a single slider.
• GPU Streaming: Dynamically streams instances to optimize GPU memory usage.
• LOD Cross-Fade: Supports both animated and transition-based LODGroups with cross-fade. Materials dynamically switch between cross-fade and opaque variations.
• Optimized Batching: Instances are batched by material, regardless of placement.
• Shadow Optimization: Share shadow materials via mesh or global material, with customizable LOD bias and clamping.
• Light Probe Support: Updates interpolated light probes per instance based on ambient lighting changes.
• Advanced Culling: Implements true shadow silhouette and frustum culling to avoid rendering off-screen objects.

Instance Context and Tools

• Easy Access: Toggle with Tab or scene view context.
• Built-in Tools: Use standard tools (move, rotate, scale) on any instance or selection.
• Painting Tools: Use brushes for placing, painting, erasing, filling, and scaling instances.
• Placement Settings: Customize density, radius, scale/rotation randomization, and slope/height masks.
• Intuitive UI: Modern overlay interface for seamless environment work.
• Custom Shortcut Context: Ensures no conflicting shortcut keys.

Integration and Tools

• Prefab Support: Paint and edit instances within your prefabs. Create an overgrown house prefab, and drop it in a scene.
• Selection Support: Allows instance selection directly from the scene hierarchy.
• Prefab Conversion: Convert prefabs to instances in the scene with two clicks.
• ShaderGraph Integration: Automatic ShaderGraph patching with no modifications needed.
• DOTS-Enabled Property System: Supports ShaderGraph hybrid properties, with property painting via the property painter tool or scripts.
• Rendering Debugger: Full integration with SRP's rendering debugger. Debug scenes both in the editor and at runtime to see exactly what's happening in the renderer.

Management

• Runtime Access: Add, remove, and query instances efficiently at runtime.
• Prefab Proxies: Maintain prefab instances with colliders and scripts while still rendering with Flora.
• Enableable Instances: Enable or disable any instance.
• Spatial Hashing: Utilizes a global hierarchical grid system for efficient instance management.

Compatibility

• BOXOPHOBIC - The Visual Engine

Requirements

• Unity 2022.3
• Unity 6.0
• Platform Compute Shader Support

Packages

• com.unity.burst: ≥1.6.6
• com.unity.collections: ≥1.4.0
• com.unity.mathematics: ≥1.2.5
• com.unity.profiling.core: ≥1.0.2
• com.unity.render-pipelines.core: ≥12.1.6
• com.unity.shadergraph: ≥12.1.6
• com.unity.settings-manager: ≥2.01