forest generator

[Rudinie]

I've been doing some test on point instancing trees and a wip can be seen here:

http://vimeo.com/19593870

I know the materials aren't great, and i should introduce some whitewater at the edges of the island and stuff. And i would love to get the trees to react to wind but that's going to be hard.

Curious to know what you guys think of it so far.

Rudi

Edited February 5, 2011 by Rudinie

[hopbin9]

Looks good, but the trees don't look naturally positioned. Maybe vary the height/age of trees based upon the topology of the land.

[Rudinie]

Looks good, but the trees don't look naturally positioned. Maybe vary the height/age of trees based upon the topology of the land.

Thanks for you reply. Do you mean that you'd expect the bigger trees to only be on the higher parts of the island and closer to the edge only smaller/thinner trees? This can easily be added ofcourse.

I think what's missing is some lower vegetation on the edges of the forest, i.e. no trees. These are only trees. A better set of shaders would help too but that was not the point of the excercise.

[Macha]

The camera is a little fast, hard to tell what is going on. But it looks not so bad. You need a little variation, not just random variation, but something a bit more subtle. Less monoculture, some haze, dead vegetation, detritus. Fruit bat colonies.

I always think of trees as frozen explosions (or ultra-slow motion) and I wonder if you could just have a bunch of metaballs or volume effect to create a surface that looks tree-like, or bush-like. Look at all those old masters, a lot of their trees are just that. Just a thought.

Edited February 7, 2011 by Macha

[Rudinie]

The camera is a little fast, hard to tell what is going on. But it looks not so bad. You need a little variation, not just random variation, but something a bit more subtle. Less monoculture, some haze, dead vegetation, detritus. Fruit bat colonies.

I always think of trees as frozen explosions (or ultra-slow motion) and I wonder if you could just have a bunch of metaballs or volume effect to create a surface that looks tree-like, or bush-like. Look at all those old masters, a lot of their trees are just that. Just a thought.

I could make a version with a slower rotation. I think detritus (i had to google that) could be done in the shader for the floor, some dead trees could be added in the "library" and i should add a possibility to set percentages of which trees are used. I'm not too sure about the bats though. :-)

The metaball approach is interesting but it might be less suited i think if you pass the camera closeby.

Vue is capable of doing a lot of this and more (like reactions to wind, which would be difficult to achieve with point instancing i think), so for real projects I think it would be a good idea to see if Houdini and Vue can be easily combined in a pipeline. This should be possible through an intermediate like Maya or Max.

But what's the fun in that?