Congrats + Planting trees

Congratulations on the release of jMonkeyEngine 3 SDK.



Is jMokeyEngine capable of rendering a forest?

I wanted to create a website to bring awareness to forests. In this website people would be able to “plant” trees, which would be planted in real life.

Other people could visit the forest and see the trees.

Number of trees: 400 (20x20)

Kinds of trees: The simpler the better. Conifers?

The speed the trees are rendered is crucial. We can cheat and use a texture instead of leaves, but the optimal solution would be to render the leaves.

Trees would grow and bear fruit, have leaves, and different heights, different trunks, colors of leaves, etc.

For the first version all tress will be of the same type, but eventually (if possible) we want to have different kinds of trees.

Trees will have a plate saying who planted, when it was planted, etc. Maybe a link to a personal page?

All money from advertisement/membership would be used to plant trees.

Please let me know.

JME is capable of rendering a forest, but has no integrated feature to do so for the moment.

What I mean by this is that you’ll have to do it like you would do any other scene.



Trees can be heavy models with a lot of polygons. So you are going to need some kind of Lod (level of detail) system.

The idea is to render the complete tree geometry when you are near the tree (i don’t recommend rendering leaves one by one though, you should use textures), the more distant trees will become impostors (2 quads with the rendered image of the tree) and very distant trees would be just one billboard with the picture of the tree.

look at this wolfire blog post to understand what i mean Imposters - Wolfire Games Blog



With this technique 400 trees should not be that much, and the kind of trees is really up to you, it just depends on the models you use.

If you want a good free software to create tree models you should test Dtree.

The best software to make tree would be speedTree but it’s not free.