terrain with trees(solved)

[3DModelerMan]

Hi I have a little question here, I am modeling my world after the sawtooth mountain range and I know it has lots of trees.
What is the best way to go about this?.
And does anybody here know how to model after real mountains pretty acureatly?.

Thanks

[JP]

for trees you can look at klasker's tree scene node, it's a procedural tree generator basically, but it's probably a bit too detailed if you need loads of them (though i do believe it has LOD support so might work well with a bit of work your end).

but you may be stuck with pretty simple trees that have like a few quads making up bunches of branches.. which would look pretty crappy.

what exactly is your game going to play like? Are you running around on the ground in this dense forest? Are you flying around in the sky and can see for miles around?

You may be able to setup a good LOD system where the few trees around you are really nicely modelled but as they get further away they get progressively crappier and lower poly so they're not as expensive to render, but it wouldn't matter too much that they're crappy because they'll be in the distance or mostly obscured by trees that are closer.

To model mountains accurately you have to go to the mountains and take loads of reference shots at ground level and from the air...

[FuzzYspo0N]

for people to read ur thread, try a better title.

[Johan]

one of those topographic maps maby on a pc which shows the hight and outlines of that area ,used as backround within your modeling app , op maby like a geographical picture taken from above -google map type thing- modified to generate a hight field on a plane ? im no expert but theres always a way ,sometimes you got to think backwards instead of the usual logical way

[3DModelerMan]

Well I have a good idea for the actual terrain now...but the trees are still going to be a nuisance.
What I'm doing is a game where you play as a wolf, in a huge area
that is modeled (hopefully) photorealisticly after the sawtooth mountain range. For terrain though I still have one more question, I want caves in my terrain so what should I do about that? because I need a dynamic LOD system to.
Thanks .

[JP]

well you cant do caves with heightmaps so that kinda screws up your use of heightmaps for the mountains too i guess...

[Dark_Kilauea]

Speedtree is an easy way to do trees, but is an expensive product (about 50k USD)

However, their may be a free alternative, or you can at least take a look at how they do it and try to duplicate it

[Dorth]

model various lod level of sections of your map and piece them together based on sight and distance. Hint: even if you apply lod INSIDE the piece, the sides could and probably should stay high lod, to fit perfectly to one another. From afar, no one will notice a lod variation, but they will notice a gap in the seams.

[3DModelerMan]

Thanks guys, I guess that's everything I needed to know.