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 :
