Cry Engine 2-3 Plant modelling

[Jangalomph]

Does any one happen to know the techniques or programs used to model the plants in crysis? Do they free hand model it, or is there a program like Speed Tree used?

With no further adoo, does any one know of tutorials for creating lush foliage?
I've searched, but I've had no luck.
Preferably For Maya

[stoopdapoop]

trees are kinda difficult to model in my opinion. And if you're not careful, then they can become very expensive, very fast.

Things you want to consider when making your trees are (obviously) polycount, ram footprint (if you want to heavily LOD all your trees, and if you want to have a lot of variety), how many you want to be visible at a time, whether or not you want them to be animated or not.

Can you tell us more about how you're going to use them, and how many you plan to have per scene?

here is a 3dsm tutorial for making an individual tree from particles in maya.
http://www.andyzibits.com/tut_particle_ ... ation.html

and here is a maya tutorial for the same thing
http://www.andyzibits.com/tut_maya_low_poly.html

[Jangalomph]

They will be used as abundantly as in Crysis.



I need to get my modelling skills back up.. but none the less. Plant modelling is something i've always wanted to master.
So would you animate the tree in maya itself? I feel like a major noob, but i really am. I think the average tree is like 12,000 poly's in crysis. I may be very wrong though.

[Plague]

the UDK has dynamic tree animations, but it depends on the occasion.

I'd imagine Crytek did not hand animate all the trees and plants in Crysis 1, so I'd think CryEngine probably has a dynamic option also.

You'd want to use that for stuff like having the trees sway in a heavy wind using the actual physics engine.


You'd still need to skin and set-up the skeleton for the tree ofc.


A lot of plants can be made starting with cylinders imo, I've not made any but stems, branches, vines and roots all have very cylindrical shapes.

And as its been said, like all natural things, you need to be careful about the expense behind a good looking tree and a cheap tree.

[Jangalomph]

Cool information, I'll look into this stuff eventually my friends Thanks.

[nub]

I think the average tree is like 12,000 poly's in crysis. I may be very wrong though.

Good lord, I hope not! I swear there's damn near at least 1,000 trees in each of the jungle levels in Crysis. 12k polygons would be insane for a tree in a game like Crysis. Sure they make prominent use of LODs but I doubt that alone would even cut it.

I remember seeing some small tutorial on different ways to animate foliage, and Crysis models were used as an example. Actually, I'm wondering if it was an official Crytek tutorial. Correct me if I'm wrong, but every tree in Crysis used physics for movement rather than animations. Bushes as well. There were the occasional plants that didn't move at all though. Dunno why.

PS: A lot of foliage models I see tend to use triangular stems provided they're slim enough. You could save a lot of polygons using that method.

[stoopdapoop]

Yes guys, when I said animated I wasn't implying keyframe animation or procedural, they're both valid and not terribly difficult to make.

And Agressive LOD could easily account for crysis trees, on most video settings they turn into cards when they're not even that far away. Also when you're close, the leaves frumple and sway, so I could see them using that many polygons.

Honestly, the trees seem to take up the majority of the graphics budget in crysis anyway so there's no issue spending 12K and down on a couple of trees at a time, if you have 10 trees around you then it only comes out to 120K polygons, which is very manageable. Any further and you don't need polygons for things like shifting leaves or branches so you can start reducing the models a lot, the first lod can probably have fewer than 50% of the polygons of the second, and each level can significantly reduce the last.

[Sorrow]

Thou art looking for this

Vegetation Budgets
Grass

Polycount: 300
Texture: 512*512
Proxy: only for bending or very dense objects where you can hide in
Ids: 2 (grass, grass proxy only if needed)

Bushes

Polycount: 300 - 600
Texture: 1024*1024 includes leaves and branches (diffuse, spec, normal, opacity). Use same for trees if you can.
Proxy: two are needed, one for leaf collision(bigger), one for AI cover(smaller)
Ids: 3 (leaf, leaf proxy, AI proxy)

Small Trees

Polycount: 600 - 1000
Texture: two 1024*1024 one for leaves and branches (diffuse, spec, normal, opacity), one for trunk (diffuse, spec, normal)
Proxy: two for the canopy, one for leaf collision(bigger), one for AI(smaller). The trunk needs to be physikalized itself for breaking.
Ids: 4 (trunk, leaf, leaf proxy, AI proxy)

Big Trees

Polycount:1000 - 2000 (for very unique trees you can go up to 5000)
Texture: two 1024*1024 one for leaves and branches (diffuse, spec, normal, opacity), one for trunk (diffuse, spec, normal)
Proxy: one for the canopy. The trunk needs to be physikalized itself for breaking.
If the trunk can not break, add one more proxy and do not physikalize the trunk render geometry.
Ids: 4 - 5 (trunk, leaf, leaf proxy, trunk proxy, AI proxy)

and this for the bending using vertex colours:

http://wiki.crymod.com/index.php/AssetCreation_DetailBending