Troubleshooting Trees for CryEngine

narticus

Hopefully others can post with questions regarding trees in this thread.

I followed this 3dmotive tutorial for creating trees: https://www.3dmotive.com/f102101

Except mine is an evergreen and I want to bring it into CryEngine.

In CryEngine's vegetation budgets (http://freesdk.crydev.net/display/SDKDOC3/Vegetation+Budgets) I noticed a high polycount for a large tree is 2000. Right now, mine is almost at 2000, but I've only populated half of the tree with branches. I also feel like the tree looks sparse and may not translate well.

Can anyone give me some advice? Should I start over and create a better (denser) material for the twigs? Maybe just keep going and use a 4-5000 poly tree?

Some screenshots below:

The half finished tree on the right:


Closeup of tree:


Branches and twigs:


Closeup of twigs with texture:


Twigs displaying edges:

ed_3D

I would say don't worry about it too much and don't follow those budgets on CryEngine docs as they seem quite outdated... It depends on your game/level and the type of tree as well (e.g. a large hero tree or something simple that will be repeated a lot), but I think 5-10k tris is perfectly fine for the highest lod. Quite a lot of large trees in Crysis 3 appear to be around 10k tris or more, and if I'm not wrong, BF4 veggie artist mentioned that their trees had a similar budget as well

You can also always just bring the tree into the engine and do some tests to see if it runs well or not

narticus

Ok, good to hear the cryengine docs are dated. I kinda thought that seemed low.

How do you know the polycount of the trees in Crysis 3? Just a guess based on viewing them?

ed_3D

narticus wrote: »

Ok, good to hear the cryengine docs are dated. I kinda thought that seemed low.

How do you know the polycount of the trees in Crysis 3? Just a guess based on viewing them?

I like to unpack assets from games and snoop around to understand how they do things. I think it's a good way to learn. I also think it might be illegal, so now the internet police will get me

leleuxart

The documentation at freesdk.crydev.net is outdated. A lot of that stuff is from Crysis 2 I think. Although they haven't updated all areas of the documentation, the new stuff for CRYENGINE 3.5 and above is at docs.cryengine.com

But reference this BF4 thread

Thanks! Well they vary from 4-8k tris on LOD 0 depending on what kind of tree it is think The avarage tree is around 6k and its The stem and branches(opaque surfaces)that take up most of it.