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 :)