Build a Forest Tree by Tree with the Nature Starter Kit 2 on Unity
This kit is a great one! It has a ton of good core elements for setting up natural looking forest scenes.
It has some great educational elements to it while still providing a ton of good assets that you can use to flesh out your own scenes.
The asset pack is relatively large as it is another pack that has a what amounts to a whole environment and could be scaled out to a prototype a full level very fast.
That is part of the appeal of this pack as it seeks to take a lot of the heavy lifting out of your hands on the front end when attempting to build out a vertical slice or a prototype.
The scene itself is nice, while it has clear limits the background they are fleshed out well enough and work as a good example of how to create a realistic but still game ready sense of depth to a world.
A game can live or die by its sense of scale, how well can you sell an open environment when it is anything but? The scene showcases some tricks in framing and extending the perception of a scenes scale without letting the player wander off the edge of the map. It can be a better solution than a waist high fence a character can jump over, in their minds.
The assets are relatively low poly with a stylized texture set on them. I have some issues with the tree textures where the limbs meet the trunk. It seems like there is some noticeable UV stretching that would be hard to fix in Unity.
The rest of the assets look great though, from the skybox to the ground material and the grass cards they are all easily usable elsewhere to flesh out your own vision.
The foliage textures and prefab objects are of good quality and can also be utilized elsewhere. Getting a good look at how the foliage cards are set up is quite educational.
When you play the scene it has a nicely paced pan through the whole scene. Its presented with a stylized sunset that is probably not the one I would choose for it, but it gets the job done.
I would say that this kit is a good download, being free and all. This pack has a large number of useful assets, so it would also be a good buy for a few shillings if that was the price.
The textures included with the tree and bush objects found in the kit can also be used with the Unity Tree generator, allowing you to iterate any number of foliage options to generate entirely new forests and terrain.
As with some of the other kits we have covered, this is a teaser kit of sorts for a larger collection of the creators assets, they can be found here.
Dreamscapes:
Some Pros to force your hand
- Free
- Utilized with the built in tools offered by Unity, this kit punches well above its weight class
Some cons to take away.
- The skybox is relatively simple.
- Possibly some strange UV artifacts on some of the trees but that COULD be just a matter of the style itself.
Marketplace Link
Documentation Link:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/released-nature-starter-kit-2.379101/
