Ben Garney's Forest Pack Status?

#81 A couple on our "work in progress" flicker set. The last four are new ones.

#82 Whoa.

#83 Looking good, further the Jay's comment about Ben Garney's code making it into the pack, I remember that the original forest pack demo used an fxblocker to create clearings. Is this still the way? or can splines/paths also be used?

#84 We originally ported over the ForestClearing object Ben created.

Since then i added the ability to assign a mask image to each Forest which essentially gives you full control over where to place trees in the scene. You can draw in the mask image in Photoshop, save it, and regenerate the forest in your running copy of Torque to see the changes. I have a little work to do on it still... but we're leaning towards removing the old ForestClearing object all together to reduce clutter.

Any reason why someone would want both methods?

#85 I do like the idea of masking the forest clearing. I wouldn't imagine there would be the need for the the old version as is was limited to the oval shape.

When you say each Forest, do you mean that there can be several 'forests' in the one map? or that the forest is applied to the entire terrain and the gaps between groups of trees creates Forests?

Another thing I noticed (from the Flickr images) was the trees in the water, good for mangrove forests but was this intentional? I do remember Ben's tech preview also doing this with trees.

#86 Ben's stuff was very tied to the old TGE terrain system, so logically it had only one Forest object that was essentially endless across the endless TGE terrain. This logic, as well as ties to Terrain, were not a good fit for TGEA.

The new Forest object isn't tied to anything. You can put it over Terrain, Atlas, DIFs, or something custom... as long as it responds to a castRay().

You can also now have more than one Forest object with different settings, mask, ForestItems, etc. Of course processing each forest has its own overhead, so you want to limit them to as few as possible. Use one unless you have a reason not to.

The trees in the water were just me being lazy with my test level... although trees reflecting in the water look really cool. You can limit item placement in a few different ways including avoiding raycasts that hit water, using the mask, or elevation ranges.

Any other questions? :)

#87 Ok, just one more and I'll be quiet until its release, does the forest have to be the same tree object or can several different tree objects be used for the Forest?

#88 You can have as many different ForestItems as you like in a single Forest object. You can even mix DTS and SpeedTree ForestItems if you own the SpeedTree version.

Still the more ForestItems types the more rendering overhead as batches become less efficient. We haven't seen this be a problem as generally you don't need to mix tons of different types of trees in one forest to get great looking results. Random rotation and scaling go a long way.

#89 Release date?

#90 When its done of course. :)

Really... we're crunching on it now. We want it shipped as much if not more than you guys do.

#91 @Adam: "Another thing I noticed (from the Flickr images) was the trees in the water, good for mangrove forests but was this intentional?"

I should also mention that each type of tree included in a forest has it's own set of minimum and maximum altitude constraints. For instance, in the GDC demo, we limited snowy trees to higher altitudes, with the threshold being halfway up the mountain. So you could easily have certain trees in shallow water, none in deeper water, and restrict some to dry land only... all in one forest object.

#92 Hey guys, I really love what yer doing

I have no problem with the release dates, I just wait and enjoy once its "done" (im in the TGE camp so I reckon ill have to wait a bit longer than the others anyways), its a great thing to have but not crucial to any project.

Oh one more question: What about grass, will it be able to replace all replicators, so fxfoliage too? I would love to spec multiple foliage and placement arguments and then it do its magic accross a TGE terrain.

Keep up the good work!

#93 @Thak - The Forest object is meant for positionally precomputed meshes and not really dynamically placed billboard foliage. I was hoping to create a new billboard foliage system to go along with the kit, but i haven't had the time just yet. Still when i do get to it we'll throw it into the kit for all existing users.

#94 Wow bonus :D great work Tom, looks amazing.

#95 Hey Tom, any development updates?

#96 Well i've been stuck for a few weeks basically. The issue is the one i left towards the end... lighting. The fundamental problem is that the imposter version of the trees don't look as good as i expected with a simple cylindrical lighting hack. I now have started tackling what i wanted to avoid... dynamic generation of normal maps for imposters.

The bad news is that it has delayed the release.

The good news is that this will work for *any* DTS shape with autobillboarding enabled.. not just Forest trees.

So once in place if you have a bunch of DTS windmills in the distance with an autobillboard and all rotated in different directions you'll get proper lighting on them and not the single direction baked in light you get with stock Torque.

That's where i'm at. If things go smoothly i'll finally be able to post that plan i promised a few weeks ago.

#97 Sounds like a delay for all the right reasons!

#98 That will be great. Look forward to it.

#99 I'm really looking forward to it. BTW - Is it TGEA only or does it also work in TGE?

#100 Cant wait for this release!