So, I’ve never really liked Mythruna’s trees and being on the verge of adding round poles and tree trunks… and being in a situation where I can’t start any new major Mythruna projects this week, I decided to experiment with some different forms of leaf rendering. The linked screens are what I’ve gotten to so far. I hate it much less than the old way but it does increase the polygon count… though it seems not enough to affect my own frame rate.
Here is the facebook album of recent screen shots… including one shot of the original for context.
The facebook album above shows the new rendering at different times of day. Certain times of day from certain angles it really works well. And in any case, much better and more flexible than the old way.
…finished version probably coming soon to a release… maybe on July 4th.
It’s not completely about the tree but I’ll explain in terms of a single leaf block.
The new blocks have 3 planes but two are double-sided… so 5 planes. The average tree block used to show three faces (the others were never drawn if the abutted another block)… so I’ve almost doubled that.
Plus, now the interior blocks are rendered… which for these trees isn’t a huge impact compared to the total tree size. Some of them have no interior blocks at all.
Soon I will start making larger more realistically shaped trees. Though maybe I won’t have to have so many in that case and they won’t be “solid” with leaf blocks. The idea being that I could have actual trunk + branches and then put a leaf canopy around it one or two blocks thick.
In my default spawn view when the app first starts up, with the old block type there were 284,000 triangles in view. With the new blocks, this is about 320,000. There are only an average number of trees in this view so it will vary.
But you’ve hit on my hesitation with them as it does increase the poly count a significant amount.
Ultimately, trees may become separate objects not part of the standard “grid” but still batched into the geometry. That brings its own issues but allows me to do LOD on them more easily as well as have them behave physically when chopped down, etc… I can also adjust the clip on them separately from the terrain clip and generally have more flexibility in how they are handled. This will wait until I have other full scale “block models” (like boats/ships/etc.) before I really evaluate it as an option.
pspeed said:
Where do you see that? Just wondering what I've accidentally stumbled on. :)
For example: The objects from faraway looks are in a kinda smoke effect. But anyways that feature looks be from jme by default. It might be an illusion of camera (frustum far) :D.
Hmm. Nice, i didn’t know it’s a fog effect :D. Also i didn’t test the JME post-processing fog yet, anyway i think this is not so hard to do. It can be done in 2 lines ok?( like the water post-processing )
glaucomardano said:
Hmm. Nice, i didn't know it's a fog effect :D. Also i didn't test the JME post-processing fog yet, anyway i think this is not so hard to do. It can be done in 2 lines ok?( like the water post-processing )
