Ultimate Foliage Renormalizer

What is Ultimate Foliage Renormalizer?

Ultimate Foliage Renormalizer is inspired by a technique used in AAA games. It works by building a proxy mesh around your foliage, then transferring clean normals back to the original geometry, while also generating high quality Ambient Occlusion into vertex colors. It is a superpowered version of using Spherical normals on foliage.

Typically, artists have to create proxy meshes and project their normals manually. Ultimate Foliage Renormalizer automates the proxy generation, transfer process, and vertex color AO generation, all in the Unity editor with just a few buttons!

Built for any foliage system

Ultimate Foliage Renormalizer is not a shader system - but rather a tool that is compatible and can be used with any foliage system, shader, or workflow. We have had overwhelmingly positive reports of successful usage with many third party assets/systems, including but not limited to:

SpeedTree
Nature Manufacturer
SeedMesh
Toby Foliage Engine
Boxophobics The Visual Engine
BRG Instanced Renderer (coming soon!)
Foliage Renderer 2
Nature Renderer
Flora Renderer
mTree
Unity Tree Creator
And more!

Built for all types of foliage

Ultimate Foliage Renormalizer comes packed with several generation modes for all types of foliage meshes. Trees, grasses, bushes, you name it, we can improve it. Even industry standard SpeedTree models greatly benefit from this technique!

Built for any style

Good foliage normals are a requirement for both realistic and stylized graphics. It was originally built to improve the SpeedTree models in our realistic game, but is just as effective for cartoon/anime stylized rendering.

Standard Mode

Standard mode voxelizes your mesh at a chosen resolution to create two proxies: a tight SDF shell that uses marching cubes to hug surface details, and a loose convex hull SDF that smooths over details. It then uses a 0-1 tightness slider to blend between the two, and finally create the output proxy mesh.

Normal Transfer and AO Bake

After creating your proxy mesh, transfer the normals back to the source and generate vertex color AO data using an accelerated BVH structure.

Grass Mode

Grass mode doesnt require a proxy mesh, it sets the vertex normals to match the ground below it, which greatly improves blending, specular spikes, and grass-to-ground continuity.

How heavy is it on performance?

Using this tool will have absolutely zero impact on performance. The output mesh of the tool has the same number of vertices and triangles, all it does is pre-bake better vertex normals, and bake AO into vertex colors. It also doesnt have any runtime code or require special shaders.

Release Notes

Big thanks to you guys for your support of Ultimate Foliage Renormalizer.

Your reviews and feedback makes it possible for me to provide new features!

1.5.3

Actually fix the bug i thought i fixed in 1.5.2

1.5.2

Fix mesh maximum vertex count when renormalizing large polygon trees

1.5.1

Added clarification that impostors should not be renormalized, but rather created using a renormalized mesh.

1.5.0

Added a button to update all dependent proxy stealers at once
Fixed a bug causing the foliage renormalizer utility component to be set dirty every frame

1.4.0

Added a new "Mesh References" section to "Foliage Renormalizer Utility" so you can quickly jump to mesh references in your assets folder

1.3.4

Fix incorrect submesh selection during mesh generation when normal or vertex color debug is enabled
Fix Normal and Vertex color debugs changing the displayed "material override"

1.3.3

Fix "Dependent Proxy Stealers" section not displaying when in grass mode

1.3.2

Fixed "Dont ask again" review button
Fixed Assets\Foliage Renormalizer\Scripts\Editor\SDFProxyBuilder.cs(39,19):
warning CS0219: The variable 'hullExpansionVoxels' is assigned...

1.3.1

Fixed Foliage Renormalizer Utility detecting skinned mesh renderers. This was unintended. Proper Skinned Mesh Renderer support will come later.

1.3

Added ability to revert mesh of "Proxy Stealers" straight from the foliage renormalizer utility component
Fixed issue where "_Renormalized" would be tacked onto the end of the renormalized mesh name multiple times

1.2