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Pre-rendering forests?


Rastar
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I'm thinking about how best to do massive forests for my game. With the large landscapes that I need, I have often have valleys, hills and mountains with large forests. In the far away distance (like 20 km) they can be done just by a green texture. In the close distance, tree models along with something like billboarding, impostors or the like would be OK. But there is the middle distance, say riding along the highway and seeing the forest 1-2 km away, where the trees look like a fluffy-foamy greenish mass. Doing these even with billboards would be a waste. Is there a technique for pre-rendering a forest like this? I was thinking of procedurally populating the forests with (tens of) thousands of trees using models at design-time and then generating a texture and normal map and maybe a mesh, and then discarding the trees.

 

Would that work? Has that been done? Are there maybe papers or blog posts about something like this? I've googled a bit but couldn't find anything. Any help or link would be greatly appreciated!

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I remember back in LE2, that after I upgraded to a GTX 670 that Vegetation in Leadwerks got RIDONKULOUS. I mean I couldn't bring it down below 30fps down hardly if I tried. And believe me I did. I think I had like 4million polys of pure vegetation at max detail + the Crysis SSAO shader that someone donated to the community (GOSH I hope that shader still works with LE3!!) settings and it stated at around 40fps. I couldn't increase the density of the forest anymore. this was at 1900 res

 

It might have been higher than 4million I can't remember because my LE2 install completely broke after I installed Leadwerks 3.

Core I5 2.67 / 16GB RAM / GTX 670

Zbrush/ Blender / Photoshop CS6 / Renoise / Genetica / Leadwerks 3

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Well ok, but I just thought you might want to know about the 'sleeping beast' that is Leadwerks performance once you cross a certain threshold. You have to keep in mind that I didn't always have this card either - my performance went from chugging at 25 fps on simple scenes to what I just mentioned about the giant forrest not slowing down, a total "dayum" moment. Gave me a new respect for Leadwerks technology

Core I5 2.67 / 16GB RAM / GTX 670

Zbrush/ Blender / Photoshop CS6 / Renoise / Genetica / Leadwerks 3

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LE3 should install in a completely new directory, it shouldn't break your LE2 install. I currently have both running simultaneously without any issue.

 

Edit:

Pancakes, did the programmer have to do anything special or was it all done through leadwerks by the LoadModel cmd?

bool Life()
{
 while(death=false)
 {
   if(death==true)
   return death;
 }
}

 

I have found the secret to infinite life

 

Did I help you out? Like my post!

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Thanks for the link! Yes, I saw that. It might actually be too good for my purposes, and it's still quite hefty in terms of resources (e.g. they need about 45 MB memory per tree model for the z-tree thing. The second (older) paper I linked uses a tiled volumetric texture which sounds lighter in terms of requirements, but they are ignoring dynamic lighting.

 

Still, what a fascinating topic! If only if were a little more knowledgeable... :-)

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