I love this little creation done in Cryeninge 3. I am sure this can be done in BGE as well.
Anyone up for the challenge? Can you recreate this in BGE?
Crydev album: http://www.crydev.net/gallery/album.php?album_id=1
Original image: [http://www.crydev.net/gallery/image.php?album_id=1&image_id=325
This’d be fun to do. I may try it over the next couple days.
Might be possible to get the main parts and feel, but no way with that amount of detail as the game engine render currently is(okay maybe if its only one perspective like bathroom demo, but It will likely still be pretty heavy)
I’d attempted to create a random forest with an armature to deform each trunk and add branches that are randomly distributed, but I had some problems to take it on to the next step and add the branches to that branches as well. But I must say that with some LOD the game engine could handle a large amount of trees. I will give it another try to perfect it. I will keep it to variations of one type of three right now, so implementing some parameters to change types will have to wait for another time. I’ll keep you posted.
For the BGE your bar scene is on the higher-poly end, but the crysis scene is worlds above that- I wouldn’t be surprised if there were well over a million polygons onscreen at once in that scene, and let’s not forget that there’s SSS running on every blade of grass and every leaf in that scene, the bark and dirt are probably parallax bump-mapped, most likely with self-shadowing. (heck, every part of the ground in Crysis 1 had that)
The BGE is a fantastic tool for hobbyists, and for extremely rapid prototyping, and for games heavy on art that doesn’t need a million and a half polygons with complex shaders. I would be nothing short of grateful if someone proved me wrong on that, and at the very least I will certainly commend anyone who tries, but it’s not an engine optimized for modern graphics.
Where I come from there are almost no trees, it wasn’t always like that though. A form of megafauna used to grow here, giant pinetrees (Metesequoia occidentalis). Because of that, I decided to become a warden of sorts, for the few and tiny woods that we have left.
Anyway, I’ve had a similar setting in mind for a while now, so I’ll take on your challenge - are there any rules?
I think we have to wait until Clip Alpha becomes available for Alpha Shadows. Alpha Blend for transparent textures are so consuming that I don’t think you’ll be able to use it for a forest of threes and bushes.
One advice that I learnt from a blender conference:
To achieve more realism in the trees for games you have to use the “transfer vertex normal” addon script. You can see in action in this streaming (blendiberia 2012 - Pere Balsach / Ubisoft) about 01:05:00 (http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/26906061)
Why not use the sapling-addon and then a good material? Is that not sufficient?
How do you get transfer vertex normal" addon script for blender 266a?
To anyone making a replica of that scene in the BGE:
If your scene runs slow, I would be happy to investigate the cause and potentially find ways to improve the performance.
Users often complain about performance, but I rarely see people make use of what the BGE is already capable of.
Good luck.
You give up before you even started?
(A non-swimmer blames the swimming trunks too :p, Just a joke.)
To be honest, this scene has a lot of fakes too. So fake, fake, fake. It just needs to look like this.
Clip Alpha is generally used for Foliage in most Games that I’ve seen, modern Games included.
Yes! Fake! My intention was not that we should replicate the way cryengine renders this scene, only the outcome, and since the engines are different the approach will be different. I am thinking of baking shadows of the ground, but then put the trees on a separate layer with seperate lighting, and also use some spotlights with textures to fake shadows from foliage. So you do not need to dynamic, static lighting is what I was thinking about.
Although I think Kupoman would be interested in seeing it lit realtime, it would then be a great scene for benchmarking harmony phase 2.
For the leaf shadows, you should be able to apply a texture to the light that casts the shadows- so the leaves are “baked” into the light, but still dynamically projected on the ground (so any moving elements will move underneath the shadows)
This is a fairly common technique- for example, it was used as recently as in Bioshock Infinite.
You could even render out an orthographic silhouette of the leaves from the same angle as the light, giving you an accurate shadow shape.
@ Monster: I think you misunderstood. I was just replying to the question of martin.hedin and I thought he was talking about the potential of real-time Alpha Shadows. I hope you don’t expect me to really sign up for this challenge because I still don’t have the knowhow to create such detailed imagery. But since I was trying to create a forest generator before, I now will give that another try. My main goal is to generate random trees from just one set of component meshes (trunk, branches, leaves). Unless this is not relevant to this challenge I’ll keep you posted on my progress here. Or maybe I will have a separate thread for this in the ‘work on progress’ section.
@ Captain Oblivion: I’m interested to know more about the technique you are talking about. Where could I find some more info about this?
Oh, huh, that is an interesting idea. I thought about this awhile back when light textures were first introduced into the BGE, but kinda forgot about using it for actual games later. The outcome could be pretty slick.
@Raco - I think the technique is just what’s called a light cookie in other engines, and simply a light texture for the BGE. You just apply a texture to a light overhead by selecting the light, going to the properties panel, switching to the texture tab, and applying a texture. I believe Captain was saying that you could basically bake a light map to a texture, and then place a sun lamp overhead and use the light map texture to produce the light and shadows.
Correct me if I’m wrong, Cap.
Thanks, SolarLune.
Can we get some examples of this, some video demo?
