— BREAKING NEWS — The ‘Big Update’ is ready and should appear soon. List of included new features:
- Automatic Billboard Generation: Every generated tree will automatically generate its billboard version + crop their billboard texture plane to match its bounds and minimize overdraw.
- Dynamic Billboards: Billboards will periodically refresh in-game to match current [Camera <—> Tree] perspective. This allows smoother [Tree <—> Billboard] transitions and accurate representation of distant trees.
- Distance culling system for plants, tree animation & collision, leaf material complexity, etc. [with controllable parameters]
- Tree growth stages: Every tree automatically generates its own growth stages that can be switched dynamically in-game. From a seedling to fully grown tree!
- New ‘ForestMaker’ actor: Forest generator with adjustable settings like min. between-trees-distance, max slope tolerance and more… + Naturally aligns trees to any uneven terrain.
- Plants will react to any objects passing near them.
- Godrays (lightshafts) generation matching current light direction or with fixed rotation.
- Trees naturally align themselves to any surface.
- New ‘Impulse’ actor feature: Possibility to change shockwave speed to achieve better effect (the further from impulse source, the later a tree/plant will react to it)
- Branches can be automatically scaled to be thicker/thinner depending on their grow height, with adjustable scale factor.
- New “Animate Branch Wind” switch.
- Significant performance optimization feature for tree animation - culling based on camera frustum, with 3 adjustable variables in ‘WindZone’ actor.
- Possibility to add randomized leaf scale variation.
- Tidy-up of internal blueprints (to make it more clear for people who want to delve deep into the generator system)
- Many performance optimizations & blueprint logic fixes.
I’m creating a video with all the new features right now. I’ll upload it here when I’m done.