Benefits
Import manually modeled trees from Maya, 3ds Max, Modo or Blender and let them get adjusted to be compatible with unity's advanced tree creator shaders and directional and radial wind zones on the fly.
Benefit from the features of the tree creator shaders such as bark and leafs casting and receiving real time shadows, translucency or specular lighting and add your trees using the terrain engine or place them as independent game objects.
The latest version of the custom tree importer brings advanced leaf tumbling (Unity 5 only) and ships with custom tree shaders giving you much nicer bending compared to the built in ones (shaders need Shader Model 3.0).
Requirements
Please do not expect the custom tree importer to simply make any tree just work: You will have to spend some time tweaking your model.
First and foremost the custom tree importer needs trees to be imported as nested, hierarchical objects.
You also should be quite familiar with your 3d app and do have a basic understanding of the tree creator and things like "main wind", "main turbulence" and "edge turbulence".
The custom tree importer script works as asset postprocessor. It combines all submeshes into one and adds the needed vertex colors and uv2.
Bending is fully controllable on each level of the tree.
Hierarchical setup of the tree
In order to be able to calculate main wind and main turbulence for the trunk, the branches and leaf planes the importer script has to know about the different parts of the tree and their origins.
For this reason you will have to provide trees as nested, hierarchical objects like shown on the screen shots below.
Adjust bending
Adjust bending on each level of your tree using control tags which let you specify its reaction to main wind, main and edge turbulence to create convincing and lively bending trees.
Advanced rendering
Trees imported using the custom tree importer are fully compatible with the built in tree creator shaders and also any tree shader based on those like the AFS tree and billboard shaders, Skyshop or Lux.
