One recurring question about the trees and forests I am doing is how they will show in the distance, from how far you could see them. It is a real issue.
I chose a different approach for trees than most engines I know. In traditional engines, trees are done by instancing the same tree models many times over the landscape. Each tree instance is known by the scene management and rendering engine. If a tree is sufficiently distant it can be represented by a simpler instance. This works nicely even for distant forests, but it imposes a very homogeneous look for your trees. If you want very large trees with unique branches this becomes a problem. At some level of detail the unique tree needs to be replaced by an instance. The more unique the tree, the bigger the visual jump will be.
I wanted to take a different approach to instancing. I still use it, but for much smaller elements like grass, flowers, tree leaves and small branches. This means each tree has unique geometry. Trees are fairly complex objects, a distant forest could have thousands of them. How to overcome this?
Many years ago I was flying over the Amazon rain-forest. I could see a thick layer of tree canopies below and a thick layer of clouds above me. I was amused by how similar they were. I began wondering if a forest could be rendered as a volumetric object, more like clouds.
I also wondered if I could make tree canopies opaque. After all they are often so dense you cannot really see inside them. It would really cut the number of polygons. All the branches inside the canopy could be removed, only the larger branches supporting the canopy puffs would remain. Here is one example taken form a Voxel Studio mesh render preview:
When looking at this, keep in mind there is a missing layer of instancing that goes on the crown volumes. This is rendered pretty much like grass and flowers over the ground (which you also won't see in this picture). You will be able to see a lot of detail coming out of the tree crowns. The green blobs in the picture before are the base for this instancing. This basic geometry is from where leaves and small branches get their position and -very important- their illumination.
I liked the fact that tree identities would be lost in this gigantic cloud. The geometry of several trees could be merged and simplified together, there was no need to think of tree instances beyond the generation stage. Also it would be rather easy to perform light scattering in the canopy cloud. To me proper lighting was essential to convey the scale of the trees and how it feels to be under them.
This approach had some big issues too. It does not work very well unless trees have fairly thick crowns. You can have a lot of small crown puffs to represent sparse crowns, but this could hurt your polygon budgets.
Now comes the initial question: How does it look when trees are far away? This is where this approach can shine. Since there are no individual tree instances anymore, the volume can be simplified down to the levels we know will look fine on screen. Then the instancing of leaves and branches continues to provide detail on top of the simplified clouds.
The following images show how much the trees can be simplified. You need to remember that each consecutive level appears further away. When these meshes are rendered in their proper positions, you cannot really tell the coarse level is just a weird soup of polygons.
This is LOD 1, which is shown pretty close to the camera:
This is LOD 6, which shows a few hundred meters away from the camera:
And this is LOD 10, which appears at more than one kilometer away. As you can see, the forest has entirely blended with the terrain. This means the grown polygons are not rendered anymore, only the canopy layer remains visible:
Here you can see the same progression from a different point of view. The LOD levels are the same: 1, 6 and 10.
Hopefully I have answered that forest-in-the-distance question. This looks really nice when properly illuminated and adorned with instances. In the short future I will post about that.
