2020 XfrogPlants Prehistoric Library 3D model

These plants look great but they perform terribly in Unity. They need to be optimized before they are usable. Please optimize and I'll update my review.

A good "starter" set for prehistoric reconstructions - it's not hugely expensive for twenty plant species (each in three variations), certainly a good buy even if you only intend to use it as reference material for your own modelling needs. What limits this set's usefulness is basically its age. The Xfrog libraries of plants were put together around a decade ago, with some materials (though not in this particular library, I think) going back a decade and a half. In cg graphics, this is a lifetime. These libraries at the time would have been considered amazingly detailed in poly-count, and their textures would have been praise-worthy too. Today, the textures are simply too small - in the age of 4K and 8K textures, this library covers the trunk of a huge (40 m) araucaria tree with a texture 239x1024px. There are also no normal maps (sometimes there is a greyscale bump map). These small texture sizes are problematic for some things, and no problem for others: generally speaking, all the leaves still look just fine, while tree trunks or the woody elements of other plants get worse with the scale of the plant: problems become really visible when it comes to those plants/trees that are supposed to be taller than 2-3 metres. Such plants, and especially the giants (araucariae, wollemiae), just aren't good enough to look at from anywhere closer than 30-40 metres. Even such tress are still going to make useful background material for renders and animations - just not games where the player could potentially walk right up to them. Speaking of games: keep in mind that this pack was clearly not intended for games originally. The modellers made some decisions that would have been perfectly reasonable for them - and seem insane if you're making a game or a VR environment. Basically: the plants are high-poly, but the polys go mostly into the leaves. So, if you have a cluster of ferns consisting of nothing but leaves, it looks great, but has 10-20K polys - way more than the dinosaur eating it :). And if you have a big tree, and you have a human-sized character, you're going to walk up to that tree, stare at the relatively flat, featureless trunk, and you'll find it hard to believe the tree has 100K+ polys. Then you look up at the branches, all 20-30 metres above the ground, and you understand where the polys all went :). Final verdict: it's a fixer-upper, but a valuable one. Regardless of what you're doing, chances are you won't be fully satisfied with these models "out of the box". For renders and animations, you'll probably only need to fix some of them. For games, this set is fine when you're prototyping, and you're not yet worried about the game being hardware-efficient or looking perfect. Before you get to release, however, you will undoubtedly need to perform a texture & material overhaul on all models, do some light remodelling work on some of them, and for a few others... well, just use them as reference material for the artist to make a new, game-suitable model. Still worthwhile!