Vegetation Modelling

[ekimmai]

Having seen some screenshots of really impressive looking ages (which didn't make me feel depressed, honest) it got me wondering about how I can improve my own in the vegetation department (-not difficult since I haven't really managed anthing better than flat grass at present!):

(i) So is there an easy way of producing long-stem grass in a fashion that is exportable to URU? I tried using particles etc (can't remember exactly what the name of the technique is) but couldn't export. (Shame 'cause looked great when rendered).

(ii) What would you recommend I use for creating realistic trees? Most ready-made models appear far too complex to be handled by the PrPRP plugin. Surely I can do better than to just pin a texture onto a "billboard" and hope no-one spots the low quality environment!

Thanks as always

[boblishman]

Vegetation is a major issue ... have you ever wondered why there are so few "detailed" plants (i.e. with lots of leaves, branches etc) that you can get close to in Uru. Why there are so many "shrooms", ... why the plants in Er'cana a so "blob-like" ... ? It's all to do with polygon (faces) counts ... more ploygons means more processing for the engine/processor ... and slower gameplay for lower-end spec machines.

This is where your imagination can be stimulated.

If you are creating a "new" Age (i.e. not Earth-like") ... then you need to design "new" types of plants ... and the lower polygon you can make them ...the MORE of them you can put in your Age without "problems" ... so this is really a "test" of your ingenuity ...

"real grass" ...well, that's another issues altogether ...

[Kato]

You can use planes to do grass. Hopefully one day we can do vertex animation to have some nicer looking (moving) grass, sort of a fake Noloben-style grass (Noloben itself uses a custom shader which we probably won't have access to AFAIK).

For now, though, I think we can get some decent trees using handpainted textures and alpha

-Kato

[Chacal]

Didn't Eder Tsogahl have moving grass? I heard it uses a feature only available in the latest Plasma version, which we should get access to when Cyan lets us make MORE AGes.

[Lontahv]

The best grass I've seen is the Relto and Gira style stuff. Basically, they're just tri-cylinders that are stretched to look like grass and then duplicated and textured.

Note: I've made this kind of grass and it looks great. But for when there's lots of it Cyan uses Cluster-Groups which we don't have yet.

Best used in small amounts for best results.

EDIT: All of the M5 shaders are in MOUL IIRC.

[electroglyph]

Some very good free software is available to create plants.

Plant Studio
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_plantstudio.html
Create small flowering plants, randomize, crossbreed, export as meshes. A single plant can still be hundreds of polys. With practice you can get the size down. You can also create plants then render billboard textures with another application.

Bantam Grass
http://evilsnail.com/bantam.html
Paul is now hosting Kang's three great freeware programs.

Bantam Grass - draws blades of grass. Control shape, size, orientation, randomization, bending, number, etc. Generates a single mesh object for each run.

Bantam Twig - makes twigs. control sides bending branching etc.

Bantam Scatter - Takes one object and randomly scatters it over an area. Control scale rotation.

Grass and scatter have the extra advantage of grayscale map inputs. Control the likelyhood an object will be created by using a grayscale square image. Paint a black path down the center and grass won't be generated there. Scatter trees thickest on white spots, less on darker spaces. Use the same terrain heightmap you built your land with and grow grass or scatter trees on the same slope.

As with any mesh based plant system you can quickly get to "MILLIONS" of polys. For generating just a few or making 2D surfaces you can billboard or even scattering your billboards around these programs are great.

[ekimmai]

Thanks for all the replies. Lots of interesting ideas and solutions for me to consider.

I'm not too sure what tri-cylinders are. Nor am I very up on the use of Alpha though I have created and used stencils (via Inkscape) for various effects and I can see how this could be applied to a billboard for a leafy look.

Boblishman, I appreciate your encouragements toward inventive/creative plant life; the large blobby plant may well be making an appearance in an age of mine quite soon......

E

[Grogyan]

Great find.

Great addition to the Free and useful things in Age on the wiki

[Lontahv]

Tri-cylinders are the name I have for when you go into blender and make a "Cylinder" and set the sides to 3.