Outerra forum

Outerra Engine => Ideas & Suggestions & Questions => Topic started by: light on December 14, 2010, 02:07:50 pm

Title: Slightly better trees
Post by: light on December 14, 2010, 02:07:50 pm
Hi! In my opinion trees on the demonstration videos look very good, but I think they still need slightly improovement. Best trees I saw in pc-games were in ARMA 2. From the air they looks like real world trees. You can watch a video on 3:25 minute to understand what I mean:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oymeVapH4go

The pine trees need to be little bit narrow and taller and there can be little space between trees. This is mine opinion only.
Title: Slightly better trees
Post by: cameni on December 14, 2010, 02:42:30 pm
Don't worry, trees will undergo a change in many aspects, including the shapes and variety and all that. The tree that is used now is just a placeholder.
Title: Slightly better trees
Post by: light on December 14, 2010, 02:51:00 pm
All right, then it's ok!
Title: Slightly better trees
Post by: ZeosPantera on December 14, 2010, 03:15:45 pm
Considering arma probably has 15-20 different tree models and OT only has 1 also makes a visual difference. Plus Arma2's LOD is just horrible. Almost to the point of not worth turning on.

If a small number of alternate trees were to be introduced it would have to be Oak, Cactus and Palm. Also the lack of bushes throws off most scenes.
Title: Slightly better trees
Post by: molnibalage on December 15, 2010, 04:40:34 am
IMHO nothing is wrong current trees in Outerra. I do not sacrafice just a bit nicer looking tree the performance of enginge. I think it is not wise to compare the very small ArmA terrain with Outerra...
Title: Slightly better trees
Post by: necro on December 15, 2010, 08:58:42 am
Quote from: molnibalage
IMHO nothing is wrong current trees in Outerra. I do not sacrafice just a bit nicer looking tree the performance of enginge. I think it is not wise to compare the very small ArmA terrain with Outerra...

your comprehension of engines is too low to compare these two techniques. A better looking tree doesnt automatically mean to decrease the engine power. Outerra is doing a lot of stuff on the gpu. And its working with several level of detail. So on space you have pixeltrees on earth you have awesome trees. And its not affecting your performance in a bad way as you said.

I would expect, that cameni will create his own procedurally tree generator. Depending on region/temperature whatever. If you are in a forest you can cut out the terrainpatches which you cannot see. So now you have space for fantastic tree-models without increasing the poly-count. And not increasing polycount means not decreasing performance. Do you got the point?
Title: Slightly better trees
Post by: Edding3000 on December 15, 2010, 06:09:15 pm
Quote from: necro
Quote from: molnibalage
IMHO nothing is wrong current trees in Outerra. I do not sacrafice just a bit nicer looking tree the performance of enginge. I think it is not wise to compare the very small ArmA terrain with Outerra...

your comprehension of engines is too low to compare these two techniques. A better looking tree doesnt automatically mean to decrease the engine power. Outerra is doing a lot of stuff on the gpu. And its working with several level of detail. So on space you have pixeltrees on earth you have awesome trees. And its not affecting your performance in a bad way as you said.

I would expect, that cameni will create his own procedurally tree generator. Depending on region/temperature whatever. If you are in a forest you can cut out the terrainpatches which you cannot see. So now you have space for fantastic tree-models without increasing the poly-count. And not increasing polycount means not decreasing performance. Do you got the point?
Multple tree's require multiple draw batches. This makes it impossible to batch the tree's in the best way. This WILL slowdown the rendering process. Better tree's also kill performance because it requires a higher poly count. In my experience the trick in planet rendering is to NOT exceed your polycount! Level of detail is indeed a solution but only so far. LOD with this tree is the same as LOD with the other one. but the other one WILL result in higher polycount!
Title: Slightly better trees
Post by: angrypig on December 16, 2010, 11:33:48 am
Quote from: Edding3000
Multiple tree's require multiple draw batches. This makes it impossible to batch the tree's in the best way. This WILL slowdown the rendering process. Better tree's also kill performance because it requires a higher poly count.

It is not necessarily true, thanks to instancing you are able to draw many trees in one batch and instancing is not the only way how to do that but it depends on scene and renderer design. On current hardware with programmable pipeline it is easy to keep batch count low because you have geometry shaders, texture arrays, texture buffers and etc. so many things can be done in shaders now. I think  batches are no longer problem on current hardware because programmers have a lot of ways how to keep them low and in many cases it also simplifies renderer design.

GPU memory speed and pixel overdraw are problems which are still very actual. It's not problem to draw millions of triangles per frame if you keep vertex data small. But this is not possible for whole scene. But grass and trees are ideal candidates for this.
Title: Slightly better trees
Post by: MiB on January 12, 2011, 10:54:32 am
That one looks good (for trees ;-) ):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjZc9ayGlaM&feature=related

Some reading by : http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/staff/RalfHabel.html
http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2007/Habel_2007_RTT/Habel_2007_RTT-Preprint.pdf
http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2009/Habel_09_PGT/Habel_09_PGT-Paper.pdf

Keep up the good work guys !
Title: Slightly better trees
Post by: Kridian on January 12, 2011, 04:48:15 pm
And another impressive ground/foliage rendering experiment: http://www.kevinboulanger.net/index.html