Animated Trees

[AluminumHaste]

I didn't make this model, I'm not sure who made it, Arcturus? Anyways it's already on youtube so I guess I'm not breaking any NDA's here. I just threw the tree in my test map really quick. I would suggest the 1080p version as the others are re-compressed by youtube and are really dark.

 

[Bikerdude]

all you need is the sound of the leaves rustling..

[DeTeEff]

How performance heavy are those compared to stationary ones?

[Springheel]

Very.

[swordbreaker]

why? It doesn't have to cast shadow, it doesn't have to be high poly. What takes the fps down?

[Springheel]

Animated > Static.

[Arcturus]

Trees that mapper use usually have animated texture or partcle leaves. Especially the latter have large impact on performance. The MD5mesh tree has less polygons, less animation bones than NPCs and only one animation so you don't have to worry about performance. Just remember that it doesn't have a collision model yet. BTW, it was introduced in this thread: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/11274-so-blender-is-a-bit-of-a-clusterfuck/page__view__findpost__p__254556

[Springheel]

The MD5mesh tree has less polygons, less animation bones than NPCs and only one animation so you don't have to worry about performance

 

Have you done a comparison between 20 md5mesh trees and 20 static trees with scrolling textures? I'd be shocked if there wasn't a significant difference.

[Berny]

Nice i love it

[Tels]

Have you done a comparison between 20 md5mesh trees and 20 static trees with scrolling textures? I'd be shocked if there wasn't a significant difference.

 

Even if you don't see it with 20, you will see it with 50 definitely, or if you add 3 AIs to your map. The reason is twofold:

 

* modifying the vertices is done on the CPU, which is already busy doing everything else, like running the AI

* the vertice structs are not very well suited to SSE (or other forms of optimized) handling, e.g. when the ModelGenerator f.i. needs to rebuild a model, it needs to copy+modify a LOT of data, just to change a few vertices. The "blend animation" code in the D3 engine suffers from the same problem

 

Scrolling textures, OTOH are handled inside the GPU, which not only an run many many shaders in parallel, it also does not need to copy+modify the data around to do this.

 

Anyway, I agree with others that particle leaves look bad due to the following reasons:

 

* they rotate with the player lean (which means, if you lean, you get spinning leaves)

* they are performance expensive because particles are meant to be "animated", but leaves are technically "static". So the engine wastes a lot of time to "animate" them.

* the run on the CPU, not the GPU (see above on why this is bad)

 

But they are our "next best thing" and I am sure that a few issues could actually be fixed either by having a new particle generator, which would fix these issues, and maybe even later generate the particles on the GPU.

 

Making "md5 animated trees" does not solve any of these issues, and you and up with a fairly fixed set of mesh and animation, which is hard to change later, if at all. With f.i. particles or auto-generated trees, the mapper (even inexperienced ones) can later change them easily, even with spawnargs.