Question about trees in games and SpeedTree

Development Rendering
1

Hello everyone!

I wondering how to make usable trees for games. I’ve been using SpeedTree so far and getting really good results. But the result is way too high poly to be usable… It gets around 8k polys which is TOOO MUCH. I tried lowering the polys and got them down to 4k which is still way too high and gets pretty ugly. Any suggestions?

2

You could create your own trees in a 3d program e.g ?v=TTFdYNV5JHs (just a basic version how it works). I personally use around 4k tris for my trees which are designed for an open world game. So the tri/poly count depends on how you want to use the trees.

In speedtree you can also decrease the tri count -> take a look at the speedtree doc :slight_smile:

In general:

  1. make sure that you use lod’s for your trees -> the 3rd lod channel should be just a plane
  2. use a foliage shader setup
  3. use planes for the branches and leaves
3

Wow really? 4k is normal for a tree? I thought it was too much.

4

4k **tris **is pretty good for a tree -> epic games is even using more tris for their trees in their kite demo (download the content and take a look at it) :slight_smile: