Things go on

It has been a long time since I posted something, my work leaves me only few moments free and, after all, I have a life, a wife and three dogs....
Anyway the trees project went very well, my goals were completely satisfied, now I have billboarded leaves, wind animation and bumpmapped trunk.

It looks fantastic, just like speedtree :)

Now my goal is changed. I want to obtain a very dense and realistic grass coverage not only randomly placed but spreaded across a list of particular textures, so to obtain areas not covered (i.e. roads) and I'm working hard on it.
The problem is that to obtain a dense coverage the quantity of grass is about some tenth of thousand meshes.
Using billboards was easy but way too slow and so I swithced to minimeshes that seem to resolve my issue : I've created 30000 meshes in about 2.5 seconds on a laptop with a x700 mobile. Not bad at all.

Now I have to develop a LOD system and a visibility check and have to make grass move but, unfortunately I can't use custom shaders since minimesh don't accept this kind of things (they're already shader driven) so I have to code it directly on CPU.
I will let you know.

A bunch of screenshots will follow. Here is a sample of mini grass in action :

First attempts

After a long period spent in my real life work (I had to pay sooo many bills) I managed to have some free time to start an istruction tour with Truevision (the rendering engine I've choosen).

Once spent some time to learn the basics I turned to a more ambitious project : some nature shots.

I believe that in nowadays games the location is not a mere complement to the game experience but have the same importance that gameplay has. So I decided to create a nice landscape to ove in and discovered that the application that I use to create trees makes some decent lowpoly trunk but uses static geometry for the leaves.

Whilst this may be perfectly acceptable in a low budget game (mine is more a tiny budget) I wanted more.

Speedtree may be a solution but, like many others, I can't afford such a brilliant and expensive middleware so I started a project on my own.

Given the friendly community at the Truevision home I made some research and found that Zaknafein (the community HLSL guru) made a collection of extremely useful shaders and let the community use them. Kudos to you Zak !

So my trees now move in the wind ! Great !

But the leaves problem remains.

Solution : convert the static quads into camera facing billboards; after spending some time I've found that this approach is not that difficult and I'm quite satisfied with the results.

The next step will be adding bump mapping to trunks and leaves and wind effect on leaves...

Stay tuned :)