Vegetation Optimization

Rendering complex vegetation assets like trees and shrubs can be challenging. Traditional optimization methods, such as Triangle Reducer or Remesher, often also struggle with these types of assets. Triangle reduction can make vegetation look sparse because leaves generally have low connectivity. On the other hand, remeshing can result in an excessively dense foliage appearance, which is not ideal either.

To solve these problems, we developed the Billboard Cloud for Foliage. This tool creates a view-independent impostor that preserves depth and volume after optimization, ensuring high visual quality from every angle. It simplifies complex geometries into a series of billboards, with materials efficiently applied through material baking.

The tool also includes a trunk detection feature, which identifies the trunk and other connected parts of the tree that are better suited for triangle reduction. It automatically detects the trunk by analyzing connectivity data or based on a material list. The final optimized asset includes billboards with baked material and a trunk model refined using triangle reduction with the original material.

The vegetation optimizer is versatile, suitable for creating Level of Detail (LODs) for existing vegetation assets or generating new highest fidelity (aka LOD0) models for platforms with limited processing power. It can also produce HLOD meshes for foliage clusters, streamlining them into a single optimized HLOD mesh. Additionally, billboard cloud vegetation can be used to optimize shadow rendering, even at close range.

To reduce overdraw and minimize transparent pixels, the tool can generate a tight-fitting impostor. It uses the alpha channel of the material to create an impostor that closely follows the asset’s contours, reducing the need for costly transparent materials and lowering overdraw.

Adjust the density and complexity of billboards to balance visual quality with performance. You can also customize the resolution of baked billboard textures and choose which material channels to bake.

Billboard Clouds for Vegetation integrates seamlessly with other Simplygon features, further enhancing its applicability:

• Use it with Compute Casting to create efficient proxies for vegetation assets with complex shaders.
• Retain high-quality details in close-up vegetation by employing a hybrid LOD chain using Triangle Reducer for early LODs, and using billboard clouds for lower fidelity levels.

We continuously improve our algorithms in collaboration with developers worldwide to meet the growing demands for higher graphic quality. If you are interested in evaluating how to optimize the vegetation in your game contact us for an evaluation.