This is a thread I’m starting to collect my work into one space- with the double intention of both obtaining feedback and to show what I am currently working on.
First up is trees. I recently decided it was time to try and make some trees from scratch. I know that technically there are a few tricks required to get trees to look right. I found a few good articles online ad I’ll try to add some links here. Basically, you want to bend the vertex normals so there are no harsh lighting effects. There is nothing fancy here. I decided to go with the basic “cutout/diffuse” shader - no normal maps. Its no where near AAA but probably approaches something you might see in video games around 10 years ago. My own philosophy is to try and create something nice using the least resources possible. Trees and vegetation in general are challenging by definition because they require alpha sorting and you usually need a lot of them. I also found that while you could fit an entire branch on less triangles you are shooting yourself in the foot if you increase the amount of alpha area in the texture. It is better to have less alpha and more mesh - if that makes sense. I also read somewhere that double sided faces are better than a second pass in the shader - so the triangle count of each tree is doubled but the saving on the shader side is that you don’t need to render the same face twice using forward and back culling? I’m a little fuzzy on the culling part of it but understand the basic idea. If you have your own theories or have found a super efficient way of rendering trees in Unity I would be happy to hear your experience.
Future updates might include:
-custom tree shader for animating grass/trees (in combination with vertex color).
-normal maps
-more trees!!!
Here is a webplayer with version 1.5
~Andrew
