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[Nellucnaiv]

Hi again all,
I seem to ask a lot of questions but I want to learn all I can from all who are willing to share. When creating scenes containing elements with lots of detail, I am aware of the need to keep the poly count as low as possible without jeopardising visual quality. I am currently busy on a project requiring lots of bush and foliage. Some will never be viewed up close but I've tried about 6 different methods of creating a reasonable looking low poly bush but it looks very unrealistic. To get a simple bush looking really realistic one would need in the region of 30 000 points which is undesirable. I'm aiming at 2000 to 5000 tops.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to achieve this?
I thank you all in advance for any advice or methods you can suggest!
Thank you kindly,
Ian

[NickE]

Depending on how your scene will interact with the added foliage, you could try billboarding.  This is a technique where you map a 2D image of the foliage as a texture, transparancy map, and bump map to a plane.  You can direct the plane to always be perpendicular to the camera so that the 2D nature of the plane is not noticable.

https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/54871/what-is-billboarding-and-can-should-it-be-used-in-3d-games-to-create-special-ef

[Nellucnaiv]

Hi Nick,
Thanks a lot for that. I'll give it a go. I have done transparencies on a plane before for other things but never used a bump map with them. Looking forward to having a go at this.

Thanks again and thanks for the link!
All the best,
Ian

[Lineberger]

Does billboarding look good on the screen? It sounds clunky, but I may be wrong.

[Steve]

Billboarding can look very good, depending on where you use it. For something like trees in the background or nor too close to the camera, it's quite good and is very low polygon. If you move the camera a lot then it begins to break down the closer the bilboards are to the camera. It's eaasy to try and if you don't like the results you can always use more complex models.

[Nellucnaiv]

A little late but thank you Steve! The billboards have been a great solution.