Scatter Graph - Procedural Placement & Runtime Spawning

DOCUMENTATION

Scatter Graph is a node based tool to procedurally scatter point instances on a Unity terrain based on user defined rules and filters. The points data is then exported and loaded at runtime to instantiate prefabs following distance based activation/pooling rules (lazy initialization). This means prefabs are instantiated and enabled only when needed without polluting the scene with thousands of GameObjects from the start of the game.

Why Scatter Graph

Creating large interactable environments usually means dealing with thousands of GameObjects, heavy scenes and slow editor performances. Scatter Graph avoids this by generating and storing placement data ahead of time. This allows to populate terrains with complex placement rules while keeping both the editor and runtime performances fast and responsive.

The goal of Scatter Graph is not only to populate large terrains, but to make every spawned object part of the gameplay experience. Since runtime instances are regular GameObjects, they can fully interact with gameplay systems such as physics, destruction, harvesting, AI or player interactions, allowing to create dense and fully interactable environments without sacrificing performances.

Core Features

• Node based workflow which allows cross communication between different objects
• Fast and optimized placement visualization through the use of GPU instanced previews as tubes or spheres, without any performance degradation up to 4M visible points
• Optimized prefabs instantiation through lazy initialization and distance based activation/pooling
• Runtime spawned instances are regular GameObjects, allowing large scale interactable environments
• Scene bound graphs, meaning they have direct access to scene objects like splines and colliders, allowing more refined control
• Several available nodes which allows to create ecological like placement rules
• Billboards rendering system to blend between prefab and billboard instances
• Fast and modern working area through the usage of a customized Unity's GraphView and UI Toolkit GUI
• Undo support

Requirements

• Unity 6.0+
• Unity Burst, Mathematics, Collections, Splines packages

Known limitations

• No multi-terrain support: Scatter Graph only works on a single terrain without neighbor terrains
• No graph export support: since some graph nodes needs to communicate with scene objects, graphs has voluntarely been made scene bound, meaning you cannot export them to be used in another scene. You can still copy and paste individual nodes between scenes though
• Billboards fade support: requires the billboard material to expose an alpha-clipping property (which is supported by Unity LIT materials in all pipelines)

Support

Send an email to imaxel.support@gmail.com, I'll do my best to reach back in time.

Please do not contact for feature requests.