real-time trees for torque engine

Lee3dee

I've been experimenting with making low poly trees for the torque engine project im currently working on. I wanted to get your thoughts and maybe tips of making real-time trees.

JKMakowka

http://arbaro.sourceforge.net/

This is at least a nice reference and could be also used as a highpoly base for normalmaps.

Your trees look really nice considering the low polycount btw. Just the trunk seems to be a bit to thick on the last one.

Lee3dee

JKMakowka: cool, thanks for the link. Unfortunately, we cannot use normal mapping yet, since the torque engine shader package isn't ready . Would be easier to buy Speedtree hehe, but i doubt the company im contracted with would buy it.:(

JKMakowka

Yeah, speed tree seems to be really nice, but it sure is quite expensive.

But I yet have to see it used in a real game. All I have seen so far were demos and screenshots. And their sprite based approach to the leaves looks great on screenshots, but judging from the demos, I am not too sure if it will look as good in an actual game.

P.S.: I did some tree models back in the quake3 days (also for the quake con contest).
I released them on a CreativeCommons licence (GPL like) on out FreeGameArts webpage (see sig).
I guess you could have a look at them if you like, but it really is quite old work (which I am not so proud of by now )

Gmanx

Have you looked at Xfrog? There was a version given free on a 3D World coverdisk a while back. It had quite a learning curve, but the results were pretty real-looking, and you can export the trees to most 3d apps.

Bree

This stuff is looking good Lee. I'm interested to see what kind of tree solution you can come up with and how it will look ingame. I've yet to get any trees into torque.

Shouldn't the shader pack be along soon? I saw that they posted a new milstone lately with some great looking terrain and water. I thought normal maps were already in there, but maybe I am mistaken.

- Bree

Lee3dee

Gmanx: xfrog is great for high detailed trees, but the torque engine wouldn't be able to handle it. hehe

Bree: thx . if you look at the pics below, the trees were created in paint effects and put on planes in the background, because the player will never leave the island.



but when we move into multiplayer, the trees are going to have to be geometry. I've been experimenting with exporting paint effects trees into polys, but the results are ok at best. The closets tree is with Maya's paint effects and some billbaords. Its only 500 polys, but alot of them would kill the gamers framerate. We want to get at least 4 players in one level, with a good environment to move around. hehe.

This is my current progress on trees.



Be nice if indie companies could afford the unreal 2 engine or HL2 But im trying to push the torque engine to see what it can do for us. hehe

Joshua Stubbles

Looking good, Lee.

The torque engine is suprisingly capable considering it's age. It would be nice though, if there were simpler/cheaper versions of better engines available.

Thegodzero

Isnt this free?
http://www.tenebrae2.com/

Keg

TGZ: no downloads, not to mention no news updates in over a year. screenshots havn't been updated since 2003

JKMakowka

http://www.ogre3d.org/

Yeah but this one is alive and free

Lee3dee

seems like the more I progress, the more Torque export hates me. hehe. anyways, here's some latest pics of 340 poly evergreens in snow.

notman

Is that max you are using? If so,how are you exporting your models to Torque?

JDinges

pretty sure that's Maya

Justin Meisse

Hey, looking good. Have you had any issues with alpha sorting on the trees? I tried doing torque trees in the past but the sorting was bonkers.

notman

[ QUOTE ]
pretty sure that's Maya

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, I kind of had a feeling it wasn't max

There is a max2dts plugin, but it was designed for Max5 and I don't know how to convert it to Max7

Lee3dee

notman: its Maya . I'm exporting the meshes using the maya2dts plugin for maya 6.5 http://dannyn1.web.aplus.net/tools.htm
If you need a tutorial for exporting models with collisions, I created a walkthrough for our artists with lots of pictures. hehe http://www.lee3dee.com/maya2torque.htm

JDinges: good one, yep its Maya. Hehe

Justin_Meisse: Torque engine hates alphas it seems. Especially with dual sided planes. We have been creating our textures in photoshop, then exporting them as 24 bit pngs. But since the torque engine doesn't understand dual sided planes like in maya, we have had to increase the poly count a bit by using cubes that are squished right before the sides touch. This works well for grass textures, but it kills the polycount for trees

Lee3dee

[ QUOTE ]
There is a max2dts plugin, but it was designed for Max5 and I don't know how to convert it to Max7

[/ QUOTE ]

Torque plugin for 3dsmax 7 is available here
http://www.alexswanson.com/torque/downloads/max6_7tools.zip

notman

COOOL! Thanks I can't believe I wasn't able to find that in the last month that I've been looking

Lee3dee

managed to get the tree into torque, but the alphas are screwing things up

notman

Hard to tell in that shot, but what exactly is screwing up with the alphas? Would this link help you? http://fosters.realmwarsgame.com/maxdts/section1.html#mt

It explains a sort feature that refers to textures appearing out of order. Not sure if that's what you're looking for though

Lee3dee

thanks for the link notman, that helps alot. Hopefully the same SORT name works in Maya

Thegodzero

ahhhh someone has some fliped normals... flip your normals on all the planes and that sould fix it rite up.

KDR_11k

Use glAlphaFunc(GL_LESS, 128); instead of glBendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); and let glDepthFunc untouched, that'll remove the blending and use on/off alpha at threshold 128 instead.

Lee3dee

KDR_11k: is that in the rendering code for torque? cause im not code savvy. hehe. I'd have to give it to the programmers.

KDR_11k

That's just the OpenGL calls for that, what I'm saying is "use Alpha test instead of blend, that way you can just use the depth buffer and everything will be fine".

mikamika

edit; i really should read before posting.

lee3dee

im pretty sure that there was a label 'model:SORT' 'SORT:model' or something like that that u could add to the name of your object that would tell the exporter to export the mesh correctly. i know it worked in max not sure about maya tho. there may have been a small binary also that the model was processed threw, but this was awhile ago.

Jason