[size=2]Hi guys.<br /> [size=2]I&#39;m trying to implement big forest over a terrain, but I&#39;m not really sure how to approach such a problem. Here are some thought floating around my head.<br /> [size=2]I wonder am I on the right track here, or I&#39;m completely lost..<br /> [size=2]<br /> <br /> [size=2]<br /> <br /> [size=2]-make a mesh, containing several tree models. Lets say - 10x10 trees in a single mesh.<br /> [size=2]-on a grid pattern around the camera and way ahead the camera view, position that mesh and render it several times on the grid patches that fall in view frustum. <br /> [size=2]-in order to position the trees in the mesh above the terrain height, use vertex texture fetch in the vertex shader and offset the Y position of the vertices, according to the terrain height sampled under that vertex.<br /> [size=2]-Of course, I need to skip rendering tree of there are roads, rocks, buildings and such bellow.<br /> [size=2]-I can sample a distribution map to see where on the terrain I need to place trees. If there shouldn&#39;t be trees, I can move the vertices bellow the ground for example to hide the tree. But on the road edge for example if there is a tree, that would lead to annoying distortions, when I hide the vertices that fall over the road and show those that fall over the nearby terrain. <br /> [size=2]Maybe I need to hide the entire tree, if any of it&#39;s vertices are above the road. But in the vertex shader, all the 10x10 trees are in a single mesh, and there is no separate tree to hide.<br /> [size=2]It all seems ugly and wrong to me.<br /> [size=2]I have a feeling, that I need to use instancing. How can I render a bunch of trees in one draw-call, position every one of them over the terrain (VT fetch again?) and skip those trees, that fall over a road, rocks, buildings etc ?<br /> [size=2]<br /> <br /> [size=2]Thank you for your time.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> [size=2]<br />

One approach for the position of trees I do remember is in the Nvidia OpenGL SDK 10 - the demo called "Cascaded shadow Maps".

The author used a top down render of the terrain, prepared offline in greyscale, then positioned where they wanted trees by placing a white pixel(s), using photoshop or similar.
Then testing for this when initialising the program and storing the position by scaling the pixels position to the actual dimensions of the terrain.

So when they render the scene they iterate through the stored position vectors, and draw a tree at that position.
This could be extended perhaps to test for other specific colours to indicate different tree types. Red = ..., etc, and store this with position.

You would want to make it more efficient since they dont have many trees in this demo, so perform a visibility test for each position to see if its within frustum before bothering to draw etc.

Anyway just thinking on my feet, no experience of this

Another recent article comes to mind which discusses the merits of Imposters for trees, i.e. LOD as mentioned above.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DavidRosen/20101004/6126/Imposters.php

I haven't implemented this yet but it's a goal of mine.

As a preliminary plan I'm looking at generating details procedurally for the nearest LOD. It seems to model an accurate forest environment will require specifying 'interior' and 'edge' zones because trees grow differently and usually grow together to form a solid canopy.

For medium LOD some kind of combination of procedural followed by imposters may be used. At far enough distance eventually it might become generic (non-procedural) billboards.

The furthest LOD ie miles distant could be simple polygons.with clever texturing.

I would love to see some implementations so send me a message if you make a demo you could show off

Thank you guys.