English Elm

[mikebart 1]

Updated; 29 December

Download Version 2

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Just finished my first large tree, the english elm, I've made 2 versions, a normal one with a high lod of about 15000 points with 9 lod levels and a light version of about 7000 points, 8 lod levels. Its made to be scaled quite large, as you can see in those pics above.

I've been experimenting with  a pretty good way of loding trees using the render to texture, projection modifier in 3dsmax, ill post more about that soon, but i'd rather get a bit of feedback on these trees first, particually on performance.

Im not really sure if putting all this into only 2 materials and a shadow texture is a good idea, but it will definitly reduce draw calls, it might also create other expences though.

I think I made the mistake of making the foliage peices too small and relied on using lots of polys to fill out the tree, so ill call this the spring version, or perhaps summer (but not doing too well).

I had to cull out a lot of tris from Lod0 to get it to load in bulldozer, so it doesnt really match the other lods aswell as i'd have liked it to so i'd reccomend using the lite version.

oh yeah, and Merry Xmas for yesterday

[big 0]

Armaholic mirror and news:

English Elm

[MarkJ112 0]

Great for mapmakers   Nice work! Merry Christmas  

[.kju 3245]

Looks good mate!

15000 seems too much. BI has at max 7000 from what I can remember.

For performance it should very important how much of alpha

textures you use.

In addition the other key aspect is that the different LOD have

the same shape.

I was trying to make a replacement for plants.pbo replacing

all standard trees with the lite version.

Strangely it didn't show up ingame. No ArmA.rpt error though.

During the binarization there were some problems. You best

look into these.

[Stavanger 0]

Mirror by ePrison.de

English Elm v1.0 by mikebart

Regards,

Stavanger

[BadBenson 0]

it's very nice to see someone make some enviromental objects...and a nice one too.

one suggestion though...i think u have to lower the saturation of the foliage atleast a bit. especially when u compare it to the green ground texture on your screens it looks a bit unnatural. other than that i really like it

[mikebart 1]

Thanks for the comments guys,

Q, Really appreciate the suggestions and tips, I think I made some pretty big mistakes on this one at the beginning, im already re-making the foliage with larger planes, so hopefully ill be able to get more points into the trunk/branches and less points into the foliage, so I think it could be ok to make it around 12000-15000, as long as its not too heavy on the alphas, like you said.

I think the whole 7000 limit is more of a recommendation given around 2 years ago, and is something only limited by ones PC specs and not Arma itself, as long as I lod it properly it should be ok for lower end specs aswell, but its a bit of an experiment so I could be wrong about it all, but if I ever make a 15000 tree then ill be sure to make a 7000 lite version to go with it .

I want to make a large tree, that stands out among others and can be used as a landmark in maps, although it probably wouldnt be something you'd have too many of in one place I guess.

I'd reccomend using the 7000 version, mainly because the 15000 one just doesnt give its bang for buck, I'd defintly be keen to use your lite shaders with the foliage, mostly because half the time I cant even tell if the normal maps even working its so faint, its probably not worth the extra rendering cost, except for lod blending and fading out plane spikes, I wonder if theres a way to get the same effect that the alpha on the normalmap gives without rendering the normalmap itself?, that would be great.

Thanks for taking the time to replace the plants.pbo with the lite version, would have been a good test, ill look into it, did you basicly just rename the lite version to a particular tree in the plants.pbo?

BadBenson, Thanks for the suggestion ill definitly take that into account for the new foliage, I was trying to get rid of black shadows in the foliage by playing with the forcediffuse and ambient values in the rvmat, guess i got a bit carried away, should have desaturated the texture aswell, thanks.

heres a wip pic of the new foliage, hopefully ill get it right this time

[.kju 3245]

Quote[/b] ]you basicly just rename the lite version to a particular tree in the plants.pbo

right

[BadBenson 0]

Quote[/b] ]BadBenson, Thanks for the suggestion ill definitly take that into account for the new foliage, I was trying to get rid of black shadows in the foliage by playing with the forcediffuse and ambient values in the rvmat, guess i got a bit carried away, should have desaturated the texture aswell, thanks.

i had problems setting up the rvmats right when i made custom vegetation too. so i'd recommend to also work on the rvmats so the texture doesn't look to different from the original ingame. i experienced that too.

looking at bis-tree or opteryx lately released mlods for his vegetation can help alot.

and maybe u should play around with colour balance also. desaturating may not be enough here (or maybe wrong). what was bugging me was the neon kind of touch the green in your texture has. try maybe mixing some more red or yellow in...dunno...not an expert...but i thought i'd have to amke that clear since i just said "desaturate" which i'm not so sure about anymore looking at your texture again.

[mikebart 1]

thanks again for the feedback BadBenson, I think the problem I was having was that there wasnt enough colour variation in the leaves I just thought the normalmap would do alot more shading than it did in the first attempt but it didnt really do too much at all, it would be good to have a bit more control over ambient values on just the normal map aswell as colour.

I've baked alot more shadow into this one and I think its looking heaps better now, but you can see in the shot where its fully lit by the sun (4th shot) its still looking pretty bright, very contrasted against Rahmadi's pallete, but I think it could look ok if there were a few other colours around helping it out.

I also made a point in this one of having all the leaves weighted so that the majority of them appear to be effected by gravity, whch helps make it look a bit more realistic, also I got the high lod down to 13600 points and 5600 for the lite version. still just finishing off a few things, should have it ready for DL tomorow.

cheers,

[mikebart 1]

Hey guys, updated the first page with the latest version.

I made some pretty major colour adjustments, hopefully not too dark but you're looking at its shadow side in that second shot,you can also see in that shot a couple of elms off on that distant island.

I also included the un-adjusted render of the foliage texture in the .pbo, for if anybody wants to make some colour corrections themselves.

[Snake Man 407]

I think it could be ok to make it around 12000-15000, as long as its not too heavy on the alphas, like you said.

I think the whole 7000 limit is more of a recommendation given around 2 years ago, and is something only limited by ones PC specs and not Arma itself

VTE ACH-47A gunship is 30,000 polys and causes absolutely no FPS loss even on my old computer, of course as its special vehicle its only used once or maybe twice in a scene/mission. However this tree is to be used thousands of times in a terrain so its bit different.

I'd say go for it with the high poly first LOD, as long as you drop each resolution LOD down to 50% of the polys ending up the last LOD with less than 100 polys with one section.

[mikebart 1]

hey snakeman, thanks for the info about lods, thats really good to know. The elms actually about 18800 polys though, I was talking about points before, which we're restricted to 16000 i think.

I've covered rahmadi with the lite version of the elm, I usually play arma at medium settings, but ive been testing them on high everything except shadows and AA and havent really experienced any slow down so I think they might be ok.

The lite versions only 5600 points and 5900 polys, so Ill probably end up filling it out with foliage a bit more because I can hardly tell the difference between that and the high poly version, which can only be a good thing i guess.

[big 0]

Armaholic mirror updated and news:

- English Elm v2

[mikebart 1]

thanks Big,

I've just been working on a bit of a tutorial on making trees, for anyone who's interested in doing them this way, I've just covered the high poly stuff in part one, ill be covering loding in part 2. Hope you find it helpful.

Tutorial

[Stavanger 0]

Mirror updated by ePrison.de

English Elm v2.0 by mikebart

Regards,

Stavanger