How dense can I go with foliage?

jordank95

i see games like Shadow of the Collosus remake for PS4 and parts of that are pretty dense. And that’s console. 

I currently have all my trees and foliage (including grass) LODd and set to cull at certain distances. Question is, how crazy can I go with adding vegetation around in areas? If it’s set up and optimized well like I think mine is, what’s the hold back?

CrackRockSteady

This is kind of like the "how many polys should X be?" question.  It depends on what else you've got going on in your scene.

jordank95

CrackRockSteady said:

This is kind of like the "how many polys should X be?" question.  It depends on what else you've got going on in your scene.

Ok, thats fine. I just wasnt sure if there was any issue I'd be running into with lots of foliage/opacity happening that I should be aware of. I've got all my boulders/cliffs/trees etc. all set to 3 or 4 LODs, so I'm not too worried about polycount with this scene.

JordanN

There's no limit. Look at Xenoblade on the Nintendo Wii, and they still manage to create a sprawling world full of grass on what is now considered 12 year old hardware.

Alex_J

The game with the absolute most foliage I've seen yet is theHunter: Call of the Wild. Take a look at some gameplay videos to get an idea. Keep in mind, this is a AAA game using a custom engine designed specifically to build such worlds. Ultimately, how much you can do with the tools you've got may fall well outside the scope of the artist and how well they can optimize assets.

A good way to work would be to build to your target vision, and then start profiling to get the performance you need, only cutting when absolutely necessary. If you don't have a clue where to begin, just follow the common best practices like you already are.

jordank95

BIGTIMEMASTER said:

The game with the absolute most foliage I've seen yet is theHunter: Call of the Wild. Take a look at some gameplay videos to get an idea. Keep in mind, this is a AAA game using a custom engine designed specifically to build such worlds. Ultimately, how much you can do with the tools you've got may fall well outside the scope of the artist and how well they can optimize assets.

A good way to work would be to build to your target vision, and then start profiling to get the performance you need, only cutting when absolutely necessary. If you don't have a clue where to begin, just follow the common best practices like you already are.

Yeah I seem to be ok after I set up all the culling and LODs. Gonna try to push it a bit more now. Thanks for the help guys!

Mink

I would reccomend modeling your grass sheets in the shape of,the texture and not using alpha maps. It's far, far cheaper and doesn't give that alpha overlap lag that you'd normally get.

sprunghunt

The best way to answer this question is to setup a basic test level and put in a couple of thousand of your plants in front of the camera and see how bad the framerate is.