Forest Performance issues

#1 Do you have any Level of Detail on the trees?

#2 nope.

#3 Open in shape editor and check "use imposters", this is the cheapest way.

#4 You will want LOD on the trees if imposters aren't giving you the performance you need.

#5 do imposters ignore materials with alpha? i only get "brown sticks" without the green from the leaves.

how would i go about creating LOD? remodelling with lower vertices count and smaller textures?

#6 I had that issue, too with the brown sticks, it took my a while to figure that out and to fix it.
You have to understand, that the game engine calculates what is visible, if its a very dense filled alpha texture, it fills up the spaces between and it will look like solid, in the distance, if you have very sparse alpha textures, the game engine will calculate the pixels between the leaves out, so that it is empty, in the distance.
The brown sticks are the stems of the tree, which are very solid, so they stay visible, but the leaves are usually thinner so they fade out earlier that only the stems are left visible.

Ok to make it short, to fix this you should not use transparency, so uncheck that box, then you will check alpha treshhold and use the slider untill you like the value, then you save and switch to shape editor and generate your imposters, then you test if it looks okay, if you still got stems, you need to go back to the material editor and lower your alpha threshhold value to produce a more thick shape, that can be impostered better, untill you like the result.

#7 thank you very much, that helped me out a lot.

I think it looks alright for a prototype:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHtOE6S5yvo

models/textures are under an open source license; scene created in 2 days without prior knowledge of torque 3d which shows a quite steep learning curve imo.

#8 I think I know these open source models, the have pretty high poly count, they are not designed to be used in a game engine.
But for the beginning, not bad.

#9 Trees have between 1000 and 3000 polys which is a bit high, but imo should still be ok.

#10 It's ok if you have LODs and it depends on what you want to do, if you want 1 or 10 of them in a scene, its ok, but if you want to have 100 or 1000 this can get problematic.

#11 @Duion, thx for that tip on impostors, I usually just up the resolution the imposter is created at, from say 128 to 256 this produces a much better imposter but at the cost of texture size, so in the long run if you are using a lot of trees your way is better.

@Simon, LOD make a huge difference in the performance, if you are looking for some free LOD'd trees take a look at forester pro, www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/22023 I love it, you get some of the trees for FREE and they allow you to use them without restriction. If you get the full version there is a full tree CAD package in there, it's great :-)

Your video is nice, Torque3D is very powerful and can produce some wonderful scenes once you know how and it looks like your well on your way, keep it up :-)

#12 Increasing imposter resolution is not very useful, because if your tree switches to imposter when it is on the screen only 128 pixel tall, much higher resolutions do not make sense, because there is not more room to diplay more pixels than 128.
The default 128 is also very early for imposters, if you have build in LOD you may want to go much lower than this like 80 or 50. 80 is a good value, the imposters from that fit on a 256x256 big texture.