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Trees in TGEA

by Morrie · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 05/03/2007 (1:04 pm) · 7 replies

Iwas wondering since TGEA suports normal maps if I could nomal map some trees and make a forest without killing the frame rate or slowing down the game.
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Torque 3D Owner Morrie
#1
05/03/2007 (1:59 pm)
Kind of like in the Unreal 3 engine or in the Speedtree where the trees would look more real

Torque 3D Owner Mark Dynna
#2
05/03/2007 (3:30 pm)
You betcha it does! They're referred to as Bump Maps in TGEA. Search TDN for the article title "Materials."

Torque 3D Owner Morrie
#3
05/03/2007 (3:47 pm)
Thats nice I was woundering whether to change to TGEA or not

Associate Tom Spilman
Sickhead Games
#4
05/04/2007 (9:08 am)
You can use normal maps for sure... but depending on your definition of "forest" you may or may not have performance trouble. Assuming you have a good lod setup for your trees... if you get more than a few hundred DTS shapes in the scene you'll start seeing performance hits from scene graph traversal and, depending on your video card, rendering limits.

Torque 3D Owner Morrie
#5
05/04/2007 (11:37 am)
I'm talking about 50 to 100 trees

Associate Tom Spilman
Sickhead Games
#6
05/04/2007 (11:48 am)
Then you should be fine if your machine is reasonably fast... but i suggest you test this theory before you get too far into your project. ;)

Associate Manoel Neto
Default Studio Name
#7
05/07/2007 (7:03 am)
Using normal maps, you can make a billboard tree which reacts to the lighting in the same way a 3D tree would. You could use the billboard as the last LOD in your tree.