Trees

[Haucusuchus]

While playing NWN today, i realized something: I have yet to see a fully-3D, well crafted tree in a game. Looking at the forests in NWN, which consist of walls with tree-like textures, I wondered; How hard can it be to make a good tree? Pretty hard, i'd guess, since even the newest games with incredible graphics still have poor trees (such as UT2004). My question is, have any of you NGEMUers found a game(s) with realistic trees that are in full 3-d?

[Frostmourne]

hmm have you tried Dungeon Seige ? i never really stopped to watch the trees but that game really had some awesome graphics and was much better than NWN IMHO. atleast the forests looked way better than the ones in NWN.

[Razor Blade]

Well in Giants: Citizen Kabuto the trees are fully 3D. For the time they were great. They consisted mostly of Palm Trees. I'll post a shot for you.

edit: Found one. They suck these days, but back then it was state of the art.

Attached Images

giants_screen005.jpg (109.0 KB, 30 views)

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[Mako Eyes]

Things such as fire, water, and trees are rather difficult to make look realistic in 3D while still maintaining performance. Though many developers managed to master fire effects a while ago, and good water effects can be found in games like Super Mario Sunshine.

I agree though, not many games have realistic looking 3D trees. The ones that DO look realistic are those that are billboarded (Super Mario 64, Sonic Adventure 2), but this is hardly considered 3D. But, it can be done, and done easily. I remember I had 3Dmark 2000 once, and ran a demo that later showed a field scene with blowing long grass and trees and running water. It looked SPECTACULAR and almost photographic, but doing such is mighty difficult for a system to handle. Chances are, any game that has realistic trees these days only have one or two per scene. But as things get more powerful, it'll be practical to make an entire forest look like a bunch realistic individual trees.

[WindHydra]

Yup, the trees in 3D mark 2000 looks amazing

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[Haucusuchus]

"with blowing long grass and trees"

Yeah, I just realized i should have been more specific; What I probably should have asked for was good FOLIAGE. I've seen some pretty good-looking tree trunks, but the leaves always end up looking like paper, as does grass.

And if anyone has any more good screenshots of well made trees or grass, go ahead and post them!

[Zer0Soul]

I thought Farcry did trees nicely. I am going to load up a few other games that in the past have had very nice trees. Yet, when it comes to more recent games. This is about the only one that I can think of.

Thanks Razor for reminding me. I believe Armed and Dangerous had nice trees as well. I'll load it up and check as well.

Attached Images

	FarCry0000.jpg (55.0 KB, 44 views)
	FarCry0002.jpg (45.0 KB, 62 views)

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[Razor Blade]

Heh, weird, I just finished playing Far Cry and was gonna post some shots of the trees. Well like Zer0Soul said, Far Cry has very nice trees.

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[Haucusuchus]

Originally Posted by Razor Blade

Heh, weird, I just finished playing Far Cry and was gonna post some shots of the trees. Well like Zer0Soul said, Far Cry has very nice trees.

They still have the paper foliage, though. I think Morrowind may have had good leaves, but I can't remember and don't have it installed on my machine now.

[Lobo]

Paper foliage? There's not gonna be another way to do grass for a long time, but even the bushes in Farcry were 3 dimensional. Grass is practically 2 dimensional anyway.

But getting back on track, the trees in Farcry are definitley the best yet, individual leaves, you can zoom in on them and they still look great. Best forests yet.

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[Razor Blade]

I'm gonna have to agree. If all trees and single leaves were all 3D polygonal models, it woul;d slow even the fastest PC to a hault. It's not realistic with todays technology. But Far Cry even though, the leaves are kinda flat paper like, they still look 3D and do have dimension to them still.

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[Zer0Soul]

Plus it's dang cool to sneak through them and stumble upon a squad of guys. Then wipe them out in a bloody mess of goo... then hide again. *sighs*

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[Zapages]

Try the new Prince of Persia Game, it had trees (or palm trees) that were in 3D... That looked awesome in the wind and all.

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[aliofdoom]

will about trees i saw some very good trees in thief 2, helo, ninja giaden and FF on the GC.

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[Kane]

If you want a 'proper' tree, you need at least a poly per leaf (that's simplest, using aplha-textures), not to mention the polys for the trunk/branches. Now, that's a lot of polys. Further, your leaves don't bend at all, so perhaps we should have about 4 polys per leaf, to allow them to warp properly.
Now, take a large oak tree with as many as 10,000 leaves. Add the detail of the branches and the trunk, and you are talking a model with as many as 60,000 polys.
Now think that normaly we don't see trees on thier own. Let's talk an average of say 25 trees on screen at the same time. That's a million and a half polys on scree before we even get to the rest of the landscape, the main character, the enemies/NPCs/whatever.
It's simply not viable, so developers have to take shortcuts. Some take more elegent shortcuts, such as rendering a couple of branches as a single pair of polys with alpha textures, allowing those to drift in the 'wind'. This is the approach used in 3DMark 2001 IIRC. Others take the uber simplistic approach. Let's use a textured X to show the tree, or even in some older racing games; let's just texture trees as the backdrop.

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