Creating forest etc in 3d games

[Mouth for war]

Hey! I've been playing around with 3d lately and before doing something "stupid" I thought I should ask someone who knows about these things. When you create a forest for example with a gazillion objects, how to do it? I can't imagine that you place one model at a time and then maybe by 2024 you have a complete forest. Should  i keep like 20 trees in one model file and then clone them or is that bad practice?

[Darth Mandarb]

Are you looking to render the forest (in the game) in real-time? Or will it be pre-rendered backgrounds that were built in 3D?

If the former I would recommend a few models for the "close up" trees to cut down on total polygons (you probably only need two or three base models) and use a particle system to spread them around the immediate area. For the far-off trees you could use planes that wrap around the scene and slap some repeating tree texture maps on them. Another cool thing you could do if the game itself is in 3D is you could slap a displace modifier on the tree particle system and drive it with a noise filter to make the leaves swaying a bit. It's such a great effect!

If the latter I would say go hog with a particle system (again really only need two to three base models and let the particle system vary the rotation/scale for you).

Good luck!

[eri0o]

On Unreal there's a vegetation tooling, and you can use it to place the vegetation easily - you can either make your own or download prebuilt trees and other elements. I noticed I have to plan my environments so that it has an uneven terrain so things get culled/hidden by geometry to reduce the impact on perfomance.

The tooling on Unreal also can be used procedurally: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/BuildingWorlds/OpenWorldTools/ProceduralFoliage/QuickStart/index.html

What is the platform you are developing?

[Mouth for war]

Thanks! It will be a 3d game so no prerendered bg's. I'll see what the engine is capable of regarding that particle stuff. In worst case scenario i'll make smaller areas. I'm not gonna go Skyrim crazy here

[Mouth for war]

I'm using the 3d addon called firefly for Clickteam's Fusion  software so it's not as sophisticated as unity or unreal I'm afraid. I'll see what can be done. Thanks :-)

[Mouth for war]

It does have a particle and a terrain object though so maybe it's possible to get stuff done

[eri0o]

I noticed it's compatible with a bunch of file formats, so maybe it's possible to script this either in a text file or in other engine and import it if it's not easy to do on it.

[Mouth for war]

Scripting something like that sounds complicated but maybe it's not so bad? :-)