Essential Unity Tools for Environments 2

Any environment artist should find this Unity list interesting: GPU Lightmapper, high-end optimization solution, terrain tools, and a free asset bundle. Get in!

Any environment artist should find today’s Unity list especially interesting as we’ve gathered some high-quality assets that help to create worlds in no time. GPU Lightmapper, high-end optimization solution, terrain tool for extensive landscapes – choose what will fit your workflow. And for those who just start exploring environments in Unity or looking for ready assets, we’ve found a couple of nice bundles.

Bakery – GPU Lightmapper

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Bakery is a high-end production-ready GPU lightmapper, designed as a substitute for Unity’s Enlighten and Progressive systems. In comparison with Unity’s default baking system, Bakery proves itself to be easier in use and way more efficient saving artists a lot of production time, especially when working on large scenes. Numerous positive and enthusiastic feedbacks don’t leave a doubt about the helpfulness of this asset.

Please note: the asset requires modern Nvidia GPU (6xx or newer) and 64-bit Windows (7 or higher).

Some of the features:

  • Physically correct baked lighting. All results were compared against Mitsuba offline renderer
  • Performance: uses GPU for ray-tracing
  • Uses NVidia AI Denoiser to remove noise, powered by deep learning
  • Fixes common baking artifacts, such as lighting leaks and UV seams
  • Supports directional baking (bump/specular) with 4 modes: dominant direction (compatible with most shaders), Radiosity Normal Mapping, per-pixel spherical harmonics, as well as simply baking normal maps to diffuse
  • Can produce both complete and indirect lightmaps, or even mix both per-light
  • and more

Amplify Impostors

Amplify Impostors is a noteworthy optimization solution that uses next-generation Billboard Impostors to quickly and efficiently optimize any objects distant from the camera. If your final meshes tend to have high LODs making the whole scene heavier, Amplify Impostors might be very handy. What are impostors exactly? They are camera facing quads, or simple polygonal shapes, that replace complex geometry by rendering a fake 3D representation of the original object.

The asset has been covered in one of our articles, and if you’d like to read more about the way it functions and what it can do, follow here.

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Some of the features:

Nature Starter Kit 2 & Dreamscapes

Here everything is simple. Nature Starter Kit 2 is a free pack with trees, bushes, and a built-in tree generator, – everything you need to start crafting lovely nature scenes in Unity. Isn’t it a reason to grab the asset right away?

The pack contains 6 bushes, 4 trees, 3 ground textures, 2 grass textures, 1 simple skybox.

Additionally, if you are fond of this stylized and dreamy kind of scenes, you might be interested to check out another asset from the developer – Dreamscapes. It does cost some money, but the bundle is way bigger and includes mountain sprites, skyboxes, crystals, bushes, grass & ground textures, trees, and rocks.

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World Creator is a professional procedural terrain and landscape generator for creating extensive 3D environments for games, movies, and artwork. The developers offer numerous useful features that should significantly ease and speed up the production of the environments: advanced and randomized terrain generator, real-time editing, powerful tiling system, GPU-powered erosion and sedimentation filters, terrain presets, and much more. The possibilities of the asset make it worth every cent.

Some of the not mentioned features:

  • Heat-maps
  • Real-time Perlin noise generator
  • Cavity dependent texturing and object placement
  • Customizable rivers and roads
  • and more

Read the full list of the features on the asset’s website.

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