Hello,

I've always been fascinated with plants in games and want to focus on creating a large amount of them for future use/my portfolio. I'm in an advanced 3d class in college working on plants for a project but there's a small issue. Planes only render one side in engine. So far I've just been making my plants with two planes back to back and reversing normals then animating (wiggling or wind blowing gently).

I just feel like this is incorrect. What do people normally do to make plants for games?

I haven't tried the planes in UE, but I'd assume its the same thing?

Can anyone provide some references to plant creation?

Thanks for any help!

-Xhi

I hope that is a typo in the title and you atleast upgraded to Unity 4, if not 5.... :)

Anyway, most plants like shrubbery and such in games are still billboards. Flat planes of 2 tris that always face the camera.

With the GPUs becoming ever more powerful, SOME people started using more complex, mesh based small plants. Maybe with instancing, that might work for some smaller scenes.

Trees are mostly a 3D mesh for the trunk and branches, and billboards again for the foliage (usually many leaves are combined into a single billboard).

If you want to know how the pros do it, have a look at speedTree... its by now pretty much industry standart at least for the bigger studios to use speedTree. This is a "tree and foliage engine" that can be integrated into game engines or games, that claims to be extremly efficient at rendering lots of foligage at little performance cost.

SpeedTree comes with its own set of modelling tools, and a store where people can buy premade trees or textures and helpers to create variations of a certain tree species.

Anyway, most plants like shrubbery and such in games are still billboards. Flat planes of 2 tris that always face the camera.

Flat quads, yes, but billboards ? The disadvantage of billboards is, that they change the direction of the quads when moving and this gets clearly visible.

If you want to know how the pros do it, have a look at speedTree

Speedtree is good, but it isn't freeware...

Now that I think of it, yes, many games seem to have exchanged the billboards for either just doublesided quads, or for mesh constructs combinining 2 or more doublesided quads into a cross-type structure (if viewed from above).... this also gives more depth without the problem described by Ashaman....

About billboards being cleraly visible... depends on the cam. In a First Player camera view, where the cam only rotates around itself as anchor, you shouldn't notice. You will get less variety, as the usual quads without billboarding will have some variation on size and maybe shading if they are lit thanks to being fixed orientation. But you shouldn't notice the billboards re-orientation, at least not by much.

In Third Person views, where the cam rotates around a different anchor, the effect can become noticable, as now the camera can "turn around a tree" for example (not possible with the usual First Person cam).

Speedtree might not be freeware, but last I looked they had a lot of promo material and tutorials out there on how their trees and plants where structured... that might give the OP an idea how he can implement it.

And SpeedTree starts to come bundled with free engines (like Unity)... AFAIK the Tree Modeller still costs something, but there is an Indie version.