Pine Trees

[Walli]

yes, cross billboards are of course also an option, but sometimes look worse - as you simply have the problematic area where the planes cross each other (GI), also the resulting shadow sometimes can look strange.

Full 3D with needles also is possible, but it will kill most machines due to overuse of polygons. But perhaps Matt can create a special shader that creates those needles on the fly, some sort of "hair" system.

But I will do a 3D needle test as soon as possible.

[buzzzzz1]

I would be very interested in the 3D needles one. Could always place those in the foreground and use the lower poly ones in the distance. I always like placing single trees close to the camera anyway for precise placement. I'll keep an eye out and wouldn't mind at all paying for them.

[Hetzen]

Full 3D with needles also is possible, but it will kill most machines due to overuse of polygons. But perhaps Matt can create a special shader that creates those needles on the fly, some sort of "hair" system.

Thinking out loud, maybe you could create a stem profile of a black strip with a line of radial gradient dots on it representing the needle start points on the stem, that you could then extrude in the displacement function within the objects materials?

[Walli]

yes, that also might work. Displacement often is used in other renderers for grass stuff - but the results only hold up in mid distance to my taste. Apart from that, this is also a performance killer. Well, TG handles displacement well, so it might actually work better then I think..

[Hetzen]

Well, to be honest, it would very much depend on how close you wanted to get to it. I reckon you could very easily disappear up the proverbial if you then applied lateral displacement to get the curve of the needle through functions. Maybe it would be better to populate an instance of the needle on the twig, but know that's beyond TG at the moment, or more likely my knowledge.

[Walli]

yes, some sort of nested instancing would be great, but I guess to be really effective the placement of instanced needles or leaves would have to be done on a procedural way - otherwise there would be way to much translation information needed.