SpeedTree

Money is always used to buy time. If you have time, it shouldn't be that impossible to download the SpeedTree demos, play around with them, and reverse-engineer enough of it to make a reasonable pass at trees on your own. Keep in mind, that just as important as the library are the art assets, and if you can't create the textures, etc. on your own you're pretty restricted in what kinds of effects you can get out of SpeedTree.

Just looking at it, it's obvious that you need an LOD system with billboards, some randomization procedures, very basic wind...

None of this is rocket science. I'm sure you can find some papers or demos for how to do a very simple approximation.

Tom

Yeah,

I guess what I'm really looking for are tree models of that quality...

Aww, I thought this was going to be about data structures :(

these trees are pretty nice.

Clicky to knowledge on how to make nice trees on your own.

well actually speedtree is pretty simple to do on your on with some reference pictures of different trees


start with the root up to the top of your tree(the leafs)
dependent on the height of your node you split the tree and make it more randomized

just create some creation profiles for different tree types and optimize you mesh and leaf creation routines and make sure you use tileable textures for the stam

krez:

the models is high amont of poly trees :)
how can you for example load 50 of them in the same view and not get 1 fps?

just want to know.

thx.

I am interested in generating trees algorythmically. Generating line trees isn't hard... each node or branch, would have children braches, each with there own. each child branch would be smaller then it's parent. The branches at the end would then have an array of leaves. However, I have no clue how you would generate the polygonal data.... any articles on that?

nVidia has a source code on their site from one of their old demos that generate random trees. You should check it out.

cool, thanks a lot darkwing. Damn it though, ill be ancious all night at work to check it out =)

On the Intel Developer side there's an imposters example program using trees created by this technique. Have a look at:
http://www.intel.com/cd/ids/developer/asmo-na/eng/20219.htm?page=1