Wiki and Examples

[friggog]

Would be good to have a wiki with detail on how to use the plugin and some example renders.

[friggog]

#24 was a good start on this, I think the next step is to organise it into a Wiki with some form of structure and most importantly visual examples of how parameters affect the output model. Currently the worded descriptions are hard to visualise for new users and use niche vocabulary.

[friggog]

@luketimothyjones would you mind filling in the details about the utilities on the wiki page: https://github.com/friggog/tree-gen/wiki/Utilities

I'll try and start working on visual examples for the parameters.

[friggog]

Started doing some demo images - still many more which would be helpful (particularly parameters with varying effects based on magic values):

• Leaf shapes
• Blossom shapes
• Pruning shape diagram
• Branch curve params
• Down angle
• Rotation
• Branch splitting?
• Branch thickness?

[Pryme8]

Could you please add in the wiki a demonstration of how to get to the UI? I installed the plugin and restarted blender, but see no new input anywhere and am not sure how to start a tree.

[samipfjo]

View > Sidebar

Yeah, we should definitely document this, you aren't the first to ask. It was easier in 2.7.

[Pryme8]

Thank you, that worked. I am taking a look at your project for the possible backbone to a webGL Tree editor that will use Babylon JS as it rendering system. It looks like this is going to be a perfect match.

Also thank you for posting your technical writeup, that will be extremely useful in my deployment.

[samipfjo]

All credit for that and the generation code goes to @friggog, not me. I just help maintain the project and provide support when I can.

[jayfield1979]

Do you guys have any official video tutorials?

I've seen 2 unofficial ones and they're ok, but quite superficial and not particularly well put together.

In case you're interested, I've been using Tree Gen to put together a tutorial level for Unreal Engine to teach my students as an intro to game engines: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iWfypriNKU8JQs2GEYVPi3Wxvxq3GHaJ/view?usp=sharing

Nothing fancy, just base lighting and some Quixel Megascans. Made the trunk and leaf shaders myself however :)

[samipfjo]

There are no official video tutorials that I'm aware of. News to me that there are unofficial tutorials, that's actually super neat!

Honestly I think what needs to happen before a video is finishing the regular documentation. Written documentation (with pictures) is a lot more accessible than a video (much easier to auto-translate for example).

I have needed to document the utilities section for a long time now, just haven't gotten around to it...

[jayfield1979]

Managed to create this with your add-on:

Really love it, easily the best trees I've ever seen.

[samipfjo]

Woah, that looks incredible!

[jayfield1979]

Thanks, here's what I managed to get from your add-on in UE4:

[samipfjo]

That's a lot of triangles. What does in-game performance look like, and on what hardware?

[jayfield1979]

These trees aren't for games. They're for film sets for virtual productions.

I have an RTX3090 so everything runs well at 1080p. The actual triangle count is twice that per tree because I had the resolution scale set to 0.5. In the shot above, everything's at 1.

UE4 can handle this type of thing no problem.

Also, the leaf shader increases Opacity of the mask to 1 as the camera moves away.

The original triangle count from TreeGen was 18.8 million! Had to do some reworking, but it's all really simple.

[samipfjo]

Ah, that's reassuring. The addon was not designed for generating game-optimized trees, so I was a bit concerned. Would take a lot of work to get them game-ready; that's something I've tried and failed to do.

[jayfield1979]

I can get them down to 30K triangles direct from your add-on. But they look a bit basic for my needs. If you add the 'bevel amount' option to the add-on and then let people set it to around 2-3, you could use them in production. UE's automatic LOD system is really neat.

In this film, the trees are all between 30 and 40k triangles:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ybqBk9

There were 30k trees, with 5 LOD's and an imposter card for the last LOD. Ran at 60fps on my GTX1080.

[jayfield1979]

Last image, check out when you turn ray-tracing on:

[friggog]

I added some of my old renders on the wiki here: https://github.com/friggog/tree-gen/wiki/Examples

It would be cool to include some of these renders there too if you'd be happy with that @jayfield1979?

[jayfield1979]

Whatever I put on here, you can use.

In fact, I might do a few beauty renders of the trees I've created before decimation, just to see what my GPU can do! You can have these too.

I'm going to be moving into Unreal Engine 5 soon. I'll report back and share screen grabs/movies.

[jayfield1979]

First UE5 test:

I'm really impressed with Lumen. This scene has 500k face count trees, Lumen sample count whacked up to 10, Ultra Dynamic Sky set to cinematic, very high quality shadows, Epic scalability and was still getting max fps.

Granted, this is on a RTX3090 and with DLSS on, but the results are great for real-time cinematic work. More to come...

[samipfjo]

😮 Holy shit, that looks absolutely stunning!