CryEngine - Next generation vegetation. Few questions.

Mr Significant

Hi guys. I need few answers, or whatever, on how to make next generation vegetation for games. If anyone from AAA studio can share a knowledge, that would be greatfull.

I just made approach to that. Yesterday.

So for now in game art it was something like this:



Big branch with some leafs. Then you have to bend it, try to fit it to branch and not to look ugly.

What I observe from Dragon Age 3 screenshots, and from mighty Witcher 3 screenshots, they did something like small clusters of small planes with just few leafs as textures.

So I did similar:





and here is how its looks in Cryengine :



And damn, it looks magnificent, for me. I wanted it to look like that. Its 5k, because I made for 1 cluster 5 planes, instead of crossing it for 2 planes. But it was first attempt.

So guys, can you share your thoughts, ideas, tricks, knowledge, how you would do next generation vegeatation for games? Am I on right way for doing that? Or Im on dead end and Its not about meshes ?

Higuy

The biggest issue with this is that its a 5k poly vegetation asset that's going to be placed ALOT. It seems unnecessarily high poly.

It does look nice, but still, it seems way to expensive. If you extract some of the default vegetational assets from CryEngine 3, they still look very good and are much much less.

Mr Significant

Now its 2,5 k tris. And about polylimit on engine, Cryengine, they removed polylimit from 5 or 6 mln. to even 100 mln.

So the amount of traingles doesnt matter at all now. What matters the most is shaders and size of textures.

You can even put this scene into unity, but with simple shaders, and you can still fly out with 30-40 fps.

Triscount is nothing comparing to shaders.

What about technique ? Is this good for vegetation on bigger scale? Or you have even better ideas than this?

Higuy

The amount of polygons do matter quite alot actually, especially when you have a ton of these around everywhere. You generate lots of overdraw with the alpha on the texture and are overall displaying alot more then actually needed. 2.5k is a bit more acceptable for something like a big tree, but not a small bush like this (is this a bush?). People these days expect AAA games to be giving them 60 FPS, and assets like this will not help towards that cause all that well. 30-40fps isn't exactly what you really want to be aiming for. And yes of course, the complexity of the material shader and texture resolution does matter a lot as well.

You'll also need some really nice LOD's for models like this of course as well.

JoakimMellergard

By looking at the screenshot from max (the one with the bush) it looks very repeating. This is mostly caused by the branch in the middle of the texture OR by the planes not facing the camera. It's harder to say the same about the CryEngine screenshot since it's so bright.
I would advice you to use 2-4 variations of textures to get away from the repeating look. I think you could have a few big planes with big branches, a smaller one much like the one you have and in a few places planes with only one or two leaves to make a better silhouette and break the repeating look even more. If you stay around 2-2.5k on LOD 0 it'll be fine - but it's important that you have LODs.
For shading it's to me very important to hide faces that isn't facing the camera. Do this by using fresnel to fade away the opacity in glancing angles.

Mr Significant

Its my first attempt to that, I didnt care too much about a texture variation. And I know it have feel more natural via colors.

grimsonfart

Also interested in this subject. For me i think the best way is still the traditional way, but what i have noticed is that you need to be incredibly smart about the placement of the leaves. And instead of having a single plane and using that, i usually add a lot of smaller twigs to my UV sheet and add them to the flat plane to give it depth and illusion of more leaves.

Mr Significant

Im making that too. ^^

But I wanted to do another apporach which is those culsters. And I must say that those clusters looks way better than anything I tried before. Ill do later a few trees with that cluster technique, and Ill show you resultats.

grimsonfart

Also, on the subject of "next-gen", i don't think there are any other method worthy of mentioning (unless your pros are hiding something?). What's changed compared to previous generation would be shading and polycount.

NAIMA

As far asImeemember you need to make lods that go from a minimum of 300 to 500 polys .

Mr Significant

Thelowest LoD's I have i scene are from 400 to 600 tris. And its pretty good working.