I'm looking to spruce ( it's a pun, laugh ) up my environment by adding trees to it. Now, I'm perfectly capable of using wings3d to make simple trees, but frankly, automated systems with tweakable parameters will do a better job.

My questions are:

1) Are there *free* packages that are reasonably good?

2) If not, are there affordable non-free packages? By affordable, I mean a lot less than $100 US.

3) Should I just break down and write my own generator

My main issue is that while I'm a well-employed adult, game dev is my pasttime, and I don't have the money to buy Maya or some other professional package. That said, I'm decent in Wings3D and I can learn Blender.

Also, it would be nice to have the foliage/leaves be separatable from the trunk. I'm using stencil shadows, and I don't think that single-sided leaf quads will work too well when performing silhouette determination. So ideally I'd have one trunk model which is a closed solid, and a second model which is basically a list of quads and texture coords.

Oh yes, it would be nice if I could get nice textures too, procedurally created ideally.

Can anybody help? If I have to take path #3, this is the kind of thing I could spend months on. Fun, but not my primary goal...

EDIT:

I just found this: http://www.geocities.com/blenderdungeon/...index.html

But it's four years old, and several blender revisions back. I don't know if it would still work, and I'm not proficient with blender enough to know how to make it work if it doesn't.

EDIT2: I've futzed, but I have zero experience with Blender's scripting. It doesn't work, it chokes on importing basic python libs, like string and math.

I decided to make my own trees... I've decided to go for a continuous randomly generated forest. As in, every tree being unique and randomly generated following configurable parameters.

Over the weekend I worked out the algorithms on paper and began writing an "editor" for developing trees. I don't actually have trees yet, but the underlying datatypes and editor are working.



Stay tuned...

Wow. Its like Reubert's weed growing game...on a much larger scale.

Gorgeous looking. Nice job, man.

Thanks, but I don't have any trees yet -- just an editor for changing parameters, and a "Tree" object which has an empty generate() function. But, the infrastructure is done, now I just have to make the tree actually build itself.

It begins...

If this were Darwinia you'd be finished

As of last night I've got solid, shadow-casting geometry. No leaves yet, though.







Once leaves are in I can probably bring down the recursion depth quite a bit. It's easy to make *really* complex trees which bring my computer to its knees...

I really don't want to be impaled on one of those Yup, some leaves or texture would make it look more real

Is that the Tree of Woe?

More importantly, will we be able to race riding lawn mowers in this?

Now, with texturing and "leaves". By "leaves", I mean I've got textured quads up but I haven't actually drawn the texture yet, so it's a green square

That's so cool that you can make formulas and equations that figure all that stuff out and just make trees. They look awesome. Good job.

Now if you make the trees leaves change colours and fall from the trees, that'll make you a true guru.

I'm no guru. OSC and arrekusu are. I just work hard.

Well, I spent the weekend finishing the implementation. It took some work, and while I'm not "done" yet ( I still need to make good textures, and whip up a number of good parameter scripts ) I now have a system for continuously generating trees on the fly as you move around. I also have a separate implementation ( which is faster ) which clones from a set of 64 "prototype" trees, based on four parameter sets.

Anyway, the point is that you can move around and for all intents and purposes, my environment has *thousands* of trees in it, each being a shadow casting, collidable 1st class entity in my scenegraph ( though it only exists if you're near it ).

Here's some shots:








The neat thing is that while the trees are created as you approach, since they use a reproducible seeding algorithm you'll always get the same random tree in the same place!

Just phenomenal. These screenshots just blow me away - this looks like a professional calliber game. Really.

Got a build we can play around with? What's the gameplay going to be like?