OgreSpeedTree - v2.0 released, SpeedTree v5 support

A place to show off your latest screenshots and for people to comment on them. Only start a new thread here if you have some nice images to show off!
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oddrose
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Post by oddrose »

can't you toss in some shots of SpeedTree together with Nimble? :)
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Post by sinbad »

scroogie wrote:Looks great. Just out of curiosity, what kind of geometry generation does SpeedTree use? Is it similar to Prusinkiewicz´ algorithmic botany?
I have no idea :) OgreSpeedTree just takes the results and makes them work real fast with Ogre.
oddrose wrote: can't you toss in some shots of SpeedTree together with Nimble?
Hehe, TBH WindLight would be enough for this, unless you had trees tall enough to make fully volumetric clouds useful (mountains maybe, but then normally there aren't that many trees that far up). But, neither of those are owned by me so I can't.

I want to do some nicer demos later, add some HDR and some terrain etc. For the moment I've just been concentrating on the core, if you're keeping up with my blog you will have seen that it's now even faster, I've had thousands of trees and millions of blades of grass in one scene at great frame rates, that kind of thing is my focus for now.
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Post by mr. iknoweverything »

Could you possibly cover the terrain with grass up to the horizon?
im slowly getting tired of games using a green carpet texture as the last LOD ;)
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Post by sinbad »

Given infinite resources yes ;) Fillrate tends to become the limiting factor after a while. OgreSpeedGrass lets you specify the grass fading regions.
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Post by reptor »

The grass rendering distance is quite low in some new-ish games I have seen, for example in Armed Assault the limit can be clearly seen also on powerful computers. The game does so much other things that the grass cannot take much processing power, it has a low priority.

Of course if the only purpose of the program is to render grass, then you can put much more of it to the screen at once.
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Post by sinbad »

I managed quite a lot here:
Image

Not quite to the horizon, but certainly far enough that you can't tell it's not unless you fly high.
*edit: actually kinda hard to tell in the video how far the grass goes, here's a still:
Image
The gras goes pretty much as far as the shadows do, which is in this shot almost to the horizon, at least as much as you can see with all the damn trees in the way ;)

There are trade-offs of course, by elevating the viewpoint to show you that, I've also made it easier to see the gaps between the blades more easily. At a more 'human' height to the ground, you can see them less. At that point you only need this kind of grass distance if you're on a hill, because you really can't see it end and in a way it's wasted.
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Post by bishopnator »

Hi, I made my own wrapper for speedtree and speedgrass in our project. I had some problems with integration:
* performance
* memory
* speedtree color tunning (different output from speed tree cad and trees rendered in ogre)
* dynamic shadows

Could you write me some details about performance and memory usage? Ie. how fast runs speedtree reference application and same forest in ogre on your computer configuration? What memory is needed for 2.5M grass blades in ogre?
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Post by sinbad »

I still have some more profiling to do, but at present the Reference Application still wins (OgreSpeedTree runs at about 2/3rds of the speed of the refapp with a similar sized scene). To some degree this is inevitable, the Reference Application is highly special-cased and drives DirectX / GL directly 'at the metal' with none of the niceties, so I'm highly unlikely to be able to equal it via Ogre, although the aim is to get closer.

Memory usage is very much down to configuration of the scene. Tree meshes are shared between all instances and so you only have one copy of those in memory. Renderables for the trees and their billboards are pooled, so that as forest cells go in and out of usage, their renderables get re-used by other cells that are in use. Tweaking the cell sizes and LOD distances can lead to different blends of pool usage.

Currently grass cells are not being pooled, that's currently leading to a higher memory overhead for the grass, but I'm due to resolve that this week. Once that's done they'll be similar to trees, with a shared pool of renderables which swap out as the camera moves, meaning the max GPU memory usage is derived from the size of the cells and the size of the grass region around the camera.

If you want more detail you'll have to wait until I've reinstalled the instrumented drivers on my machine, which I plan to do later this week. Last time they made my machine very unstable which is why I don't have them installed right now.
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Post by Edman »

I saw it! I saw the end of the world in the video :D It was there just for
a short time but I saw it, I knew world was not a sphere! :D

This looks all pretty amazing, knowing how many problems we had to
hustle SpeedTree into our project. Such a shame that these things
always come after we're finished :(
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Post by akem321 »

Looks very nice, congratz :)
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Post by sinbad »

We're out of beta! :)

New screenshots and a more varied video available on the official OgreSpeedTree page.

Image Image Image Image
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Post by Mads Kruger »

Excellent work as always Sinbad!

Its looking really snappy! Not that i have any use for this lib just now, but just out of pure curiosity; do you have any performance charts?
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Post by sinbad »

Mads Kruger wrote:Its looking really snappy! Not that i have any use for this lib just now, but just out of pure curiosity; do you have any performance charts?
Thanks. The video was taken on my NVIDIA 9800 GX2 which manages a solid 75-100fps with that density / LOD settings. The settings are pretty high though so if you needed to target lower end machines it's a case of pullling in the tree LOD and reducing the distance / density of the grass. You could also make the shadows a little less expensive (currently real-time PSSM with 3 shadow textures).
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Post by Halifax »

Wow that's some great stuff sinbad. If some sounds were added, then I would totally believe that I was flying around in the middle of the forest. Keep up the amazing work!
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Post by KungFooMasta »

While it does look good, I think the trees could use some bump mapping. The textures are great, and it feels like the tree surface should be bumpy, but the sides are so smoothed out, the trunks just look like billboards to me. (just being honest :) )
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Post by Halifax »

KungFooMasta wrote:While it does look good, I think the trees could use some bump mapping. The textures are great, and it feels like the tree surface should be bumpy, but the sides are so smoothed out, the trunks just look like billboards to me. (just being honest :) )
That's true. I agree with that. It would also bring it to the level of Unreal Engine 3 when rendering with SpeedTree.
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Post by sinbad »

Actually all the trees and leaves have normal mapping on them already. The effect is fairly subtle though and you can only really tell close up, since the grain is quite small.

Here's an example:
Image

The detail is too small to see in the video and close ups of barks don't really show off the scale involved :) I'm just using the standard SpeedTree sample media here, you can of course build trees with more exaggerated normal mapping which is what you generally see on the UE3 demos.
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Post by Game_Ender »

How close have you gotten compared to the SpeedTree reference implementation? (Earlier you said you were at 2/3rds the speed).
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Post by Glajan »

STUNNING :D
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Post by sinbad »

Game_Ender wrote:How close have you gotten compared to the SpeedTree reference implementation? (Earlier you said you were at 2/3rds the speed).
In terms of features, I've improved on the reference implementation in quite a few areas, such as support for dynamic shadows, grass motion enhancements, support for alpha to coverage, runtime flexible shaders, and more. AFAIK OgreSpeedTree does everything the refapp does, plus more and is a damn sight easier to use.

It doesn't run quite as fast under the same scenario, but I'm 90% sure thats almost all down to the fact that the refapp is totally special cased & hardcoded direct to Dx9 / GL, which I can't possibly equal with a 'proper' Ogre implementation which lets you use all the normal material options, queue organisation etc. It's definitely still fast enough though, and I may find opportunites to make it still faster in future.
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Post by lonewolff »

I just had a look at where this was upto.

It is looking fantastic! 8)

Imagine World of Warcraft or some big MMO with these visuals! It would be a best seller!
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Re: OgreSpeedTree - 1.0 released, new shots & video

Post by petrocket »

One thing I'd like to see is what it looks like when the terrain is more rolling - like when you're half way up a hill or on top of a hill and looking out on other hills, and mountains covered in trees and grass :D
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Re: OgreSpeedTree - 1.0 released, new shots & video

Post by kutraj »

Looks fantastic! Congrats on the release!
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Re: OgreSpeedTree - 1.0 released, new shots & video

Post by iloseall »

1,
I want to try use SpeedTree 5.0 (now is beta) with ogre in our project.
I has got the enaluation lisence from idv.
How can I got enaluation OgreSpeedTree?
Need send the SpeedTree Lisence to sinbad?

We should got the SpeedTree SDK source code after few months because :
from idv replay:
As discussed, I am sending you instructions for evaluating 4.2 and 5.0.
Our new version 5.0 is not yet available for license but should be in a few months
Can OgreSpeedTree use without Speedtree SDK Source Code?

2,
Can OgreSpeedTree use with speedtree 5?

3,
My project use Deferred shading.
Can OgreSpeedTree render CForestRI<> to GBuffer?

Thanks a lot.

edit:
for question 1:
thanks jacmoe:
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