[MENTION=3921]The Britain[/MENTION], I unfortunately don’t have time to spend an hour or two talking about all the details. And I’m not 100% firm on saying SpeedTree isn’t a good tool for -everyone-. CDProject did use it very nicely (though still not competitive quality), but majority of the audience, including the people here, aren’t going to be able to pull it off. The results you’ve got are probably consistent for you, but I don’t think I’ll be impressed if you post them here.
@kjustynski, Gives nice gain in performance? :)
Let’s import just one sample tree and see what happens.
http://uupload.ir/files/r479_12.jpg
1 Tree:
6 Materials (0 Material instances)
3 Texture sets
~8200 Tris
Where as if you tried to do the same thing manually it’d be more like
1 Tree:
1 Material (3 Material instances)
1-2 Texture set
~4000 Tris
Also, you’re probably aware that when you’re doing it manually, you can bake various stuff to your atlas i.e you can create 3 different trees from just 1 atlas compared to SpeedTree where it bakes a unique atlas -per asset-.
SpeedTree created atlas: http://uupload.ir/files/txaf_24.jpg
Manually created atlas: http://i.imgur.com/gxHhe.jpg
So doing it manually is still to this date the proper way to do it and all those giant studios such as EA aren’t re-inventing the wheel by hiring foliage artists to do it all manually for them, they know achieving the desired details require manual work. Besides, the freedom and control you have in something like Maya and Maya does not exist in SpeedTree. It’s good for small teams that don’t really want to bother with quality/performance, or are not looking forward to produce unique results (other than what everyone does with SpeedTree after downloading it).
Here’s a little old image of mine, (Left is manual work, Right is SpeedTree).
Overall, creating foliage manually takes longer, it has steeper learning curve as well, but if you learn that instead of learning SpeedTree, you will be able create what you have in mind and implement all the details you want, you’ll end up with something very optimized, and the end result is worth the effort. But if you’re not interested in any of that, then SpeedTree is for you.