Hey guys, just a bit in wories here which approach to use for flowers. The main thing between grass and flower is that crown part that one would want to pop up in volume, and not being flat on plane.
Here is plant i created, option 1 would be best to go with, but i am wondering about two things:
://prntscr/7uu3f7
1.triangle count could go up a lot with many flowers rendered, especially compared to method 2/3.
2.Will Speedtree properly pop billboard with method 1, considering its not plane organized mesh. I am guessing it should since trees arent planes either right?
Additionally does anyone have references from some solid games and the way they did their flowers?
I personally would use the 3rd method, because you will get a good result + you dont use too many tris. But the tri count is not always the most important point. I read in some threads that you shouldnt have too many transparent areas and that’s its better, regarding to the performance, that you use more tris.
when you blend in the lod on a medium distance, the player shouldnt see any big differences when you use a billboard for your lod channels
I always create the flowers with planes like your 3rd method
Thanks for input i see your point. Ye i knew that having more alpha based surfaces is hevier than having more polys on screen, which kinda makes point that actually first method should generally work better (especially considering better visual result). It has quite a few less surfaces to render of that are carying alpha pixels, and if i can flatten bottom parts of flowers into 1 plane, its not even higher in poly count much at all.
Meanwhile i was checking around net to find answers and i find brilliant tutorial where guy is making actually 2k textures where he puts in 5-7 different grass/flower textures that are likely to appear at same time on screen, which reduces draw calls largely, altough texture size is unusally high for grass. Makes me a bit scared to use 2k for grass, but in the end technically it all makes sense why doing it, only negative effect is twice as much VRAM usage, but since its single asset anyways its only used once, and positive outweights it. He also uses first version of approach for flower that i marked on picture.
What youre talking about is an atlas map and it is much better to have that than several smaller textures if you know they are all going to be rendering at the same time. And as for the extra tris, I would chose method 1 or 3 where you have more tris and less transparent space, because transparency in deferred rendering isnt handled well and contributes to overdraw which can be very performance intensive.
