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[cameni]

Hi Angrypig,

Have you made any further advancements on the procedural tree generator?

You need some luck prying information from Angrypig, one of his writing periods

Procedural tree generator was put on hold because we focused on the release of the demo. There are several things that need to be done before the first release; the work is divided between us both. It's mainly about seamless transitions to billboard trees and fixing the lighting so that it's consistent.

Can you also confirm if the "Blue Marble" technique or another unannounced technique will be able to plant the appropriate trees where they should be based on the worldly region they belong?

Now this is mine - yes, it's the ultimate goal. We need to build a database of trees with some statistical parameters that can be used by the generator. Initially we'll throw just a few basic tree types at it, but it will be refined over time.

[KelvinNZ]

That's great, a scalable system. Will that mean for some reason if any tress that are not included can be added to the dataset by adding the specific tree data for the generator? and, will this be able to be carried out by 3rd parties in the future whereby data can be added to be relevant to the type of generator used? I hope this makes sense.

I always knew that masterminds of programming came from your side of the planet. Great work.

[sailor]

I posted these videos in another topic, but I think it deserves to be repeated here too. Please, please do something like this:


The trees look like alive, amazing!

[KelvinNZ]

wow, Cameni/Angrypig, what are your thoughts on this type of procedure?

[FMCS]

Absolutely breath taking!!!


Frank

[traumstrand5]

Amazing!
Let there be trees! Now! 

and this one posted right here by Sailor just above looks realyl great as well indeed:

I posted these videos in another topic, but I think it deserves to be repeated here too. Please, please do something like this:


The trees look like alive, amazing!

[Éadríc]

I'll admit that I don't know much about procedural generation and how much processing power it winds up taking, but seeing these lovely, highly detailed trees I can't help but wonder: taking several LODs into account, won't merely a few of such trees in the foreground make any reasonably equipped PC lag terribly?

Surely vast, dense forests are taxing even if you only use the crudest models for the closest trees. And that's disregarding other engine features that are supposed to run simultaneously.

I don't mean to sound like a skeptic or a pessimist, but I'm just very curious about what we can roughly and reasonably expect. I'm ready to be blown away, though.

[cameni]

Actually if the trees are made in a GPU-friendly way, the performance can easily surpass the expectations gained from the existing tree rendering experiences, as our tests with these trees have shown. Sure, a good LOD is essential, and that's what makes this more complex than using pre-made models: the geometry has to be generated in a suitable way (not hand modeled), and the generator should be able to produce the LODs so that switching isn't distracting.

It's technically challenging, but we believe the results will be really worth it.

[Éadríc]

Thanks for the swift reply!

This is all very promising indeed. I hope you'll be able to integrate this and the biome data without too much difficulty. Being a child of my land, I'm looking forward to beech and oak forests especially.

[Sergesosio]

Do procedural trees have that much more advantage over hand modeled ones, is it not faster to model a tree than to program one, especially if you want them to look realistic. Any disadvantages other than the fact you get the same tree over and over, But it wasn't noticeable in crysis, and they used hand modeled ones. Just with random rotation, scale and skins.

Besides procedural patterns start becoming noticeable in large scale to. And you don't need 15k branches for one tree to look good.

[Chaoss]

On the subject of trees is there any progress on the 3D trees so far? It's been over 2 years since we've seen anything

[cameni]

There was little progress on the 3D trees since before the tech demo release. It's in angrypig's queue for a long time, but there's always something else that needs to be done before it.

One of the things that I'm going to do soon as an intermediate step is rendering billboards with approximated lighting, so that the transition between 3D models and billboards is not visible. I just need some extended data to be created along with the tree billboards. Angrypig has it in his queue ... 

[XZS]

Sorry for being a little bit off-topic here. Cameni, if I'm not wrong, the team behind Outerra/Anteworld
is still composed of only you and AngryPig, right ? While you mention the ever-growing queue on your todo list,
why don't you hire one other guy in your team ?

For a small compagny, I guess money could be of course an issue here.
But I'm quite sure you can delegate a part of the job to some enthusiastic volunteers and speed a little bit up the work.

[cameni]

It's actually very hard to find someone who can work on these things with us. A large part of the problem is the non-standard procedural architecture of the engine and the necessity to work closely together on things that need to be implemented "natively" into the engine. So for now we have to focus on the core and outsource peripheral parts instead, which is what we are attempting to do right now with external partners (things like OSM processing, character animation data etc).