🧵 A thread about foliage
Anonymous at Sun, 21 Aug 2022 11:34:48 UTC No. 914878
A comment section about foliage.
Anyway, I wanted to talk a bit about foliage and ask what do you think, when will we see plants being created in a way that doesn't involve baking an entire branch to the plane? Even the best game-ready plant examples I've seen look pretty shitty compared to VFX, not to mention real life. I guess we all collectively reduced our standards and can appreciate shitty realtime foliage, but when you take a step back, you realize it's still an ugly mess full of planes, no matter how well you try to hide it.
What do you think about Megascans approach to foliage? It's still using planes, but e.g. a plant with flowers wouldn't be built as a single plane, but each leaf and stem would be their own separate planes. It's much less tris than actual geo like in VFX, but more than your usual planar flat looking plant in games. But it also looks so much better and 3D. Do you think this will be a good approach in close future? I've seen a step towards this in Shadow of War, more details here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuB
I'm working on some plants as well and that's killing me now, because I can't decide which way to take. I want to maximize visual quality because they're not for a game but for a portfolio, but at the same time I want to showcase I'm not incapable of optimizing and creating a usable game-ready foliage. Now I'm thinking about using the Megascans workflow for a balance between the two.
So what do you think, is the Megascans LOD0 plant quality going to happen in near future or are we still going to see flat ass looking flowers and trees for years to come? Feel free to post examples, tutorials and other content about vegetation.
🗑️ Anonymous at Sun, 21 Aug 2022 13:20:21 UTC No. 914889
>>914878
>when will we see plants being created in a way that doesn't involve baking an entire branch to the plane?
for games in a view year with high density voxel engines, maybe some bastardized hybrid engines
>for a portfolio
present 2 lods and you win
>is the Megascans LOD0 plant quality going to happen in near future
this will not be reasonable any time soon, possible yes but not a smart to dump resources into.
Anonymous at Sun, 21 Aug 2022 13:22:51 UTC No. 914890
>>914878 (OP)
>when will we see plants being created in a way that doesn't involve baking an entire branch to the plane?
for games in a view year with high density voxel engines, maybe some bastardized hybrid engines
>for a portfolio
present 2 lods and you win
>is the Megascans LOD0 plant quality going to happen in near future
this will not be reasonable any time soon, possible yes but not a smart area to dump resources into.
Anonymous at Sun, 21 Aug 2022 15:29:36 UTC No. 914895
>>914890
You may be right. I wonder if Nanite will change anything. I know it's problematic with foliage atm, but in the future it would be awesome to see proper 3d plants, I think it could improve visuals so much.
Yeah, presenting multiple LODs could definitely work, but to be honest, just a thought of having to do LODs for a personal project, and especially for foliage which is more complex than removing geo from LOD0, makes me start losing even a will to make any foliage in the first place. I''ll probably just go with something inbetween Megascans, Shadow of War plants and this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRf
That shrub has 1.2k tris at LOD0 btw, I may set my max to 4-5k tris or something like that for this type of shrub, depending on a plant. I've noticed that similar plants in Jedi Fallen Order also seem to have more geo, the same guy who worked on Shadow of War worked on that game, so maybe he brought in some of that workflow. Even tiny flowers seem to have petals as a separate horizontal card instead of being fully baked on a vertical plane like Kingdom Come in the OP screenshot. But they definitely also use crossed X cards for flowers with tons of multi row petals. Seems like a mix between both workflows and it varies from plant to plant. I'd have to install that game again to really analyze it but I can't bother installing 70+ gig games anymore, especially only for stuff like this.