Cool tree generation technique

[Mr Whippy]

http://www.bath.ac.uk/media/research/video-based-modelling/video-based-tree-modelling.html

 

[aadilf1]

Good find, Would we be able to implement it into Racer, and also is it FPS heavy? it looks quite nice though

 

[Mr Whippy]

It appears to need motion to work, then it generates a skeleton model that wafts around. It also appears to study the general form of the tree so it can randomly seed new ones.

In theory we already have this kinda stuff in the shape of SpeedTree... but this just seems better really. Why struggle and fight to re-create trees artistically, when you can just let computers do the leg work after a good stint of programming!

I'd imagine their main market would be as much real-time games as it were for stuff like pre-rendered arch vis for example.

In any event though, the problem would be writing it into Racers graphics engine so we just place dummys for trees, and Racer fills it in at runtime with the appropriate assets ala SpeedTree.

Problem is, that might never happen, unless they go OpenSource with it, which would be truly awesome

Dave

 

[boomer541]

Nice trees but would probably kill fps. The best trees I've seen for racer tracks are those made by DavidI which he uses on his Mugello track.

Good to have people looking for infomation we can use, thanks Mr Whippy.

 

[Mr Whippy]

I'm still in the camp that a nice static tree works nicely enough.

The Racer Xtree shader is great really. When your driving along you really don't notice anyway.

SpeedTree is good, but again, when I'm driving along I don't really appreciate it, only when stopped and panning around (not what a car sim is for )

Maybe Xtree tweaked so that it can sub-divide a mesh into say 4x4 grid at runtime, and then applies a wavy UVW mod based on wind speed etc... but only applies it to the outer UVW's...

Loads of potentially cool techniques... hmmmm...

Dave