A question to my fellow devs: anyone knows a good source for realistic 3d trees for mobile (GO) ?
I'm working on a archviz project where I need about 20 trees near the new home. I bought some nice trees on the Unreal store but they kill performance on the GO:
- either too high poly
- or too much overdraw
Anyone knows a good source where to find(buy) some nice trees?
Pretty much all "realistic" trees will give you a lot of overdraw. How close to your scene are these trees? You could create a dense forest at a distance, render a stereo (or mono) 360 skybox. After a certain distance, the fact that the skybox is static won't be too apparent when the user moves around, and not at all when standing still.
This might even afford you 2 or 3 real trees in the foreground 🙂
@Tolin93 thanks for the reply. The trees are scattered around the house, 5 to 25 meters distance from the house. Around it is an open polder landscape (300 meters) with a treeline. The skybox and treeline don't add that much overhead (checked with Renderdoc). The nearby trees do (alas).
@Tolin93 thanks for the reply. The trees are scattered around the house, 5 to 25 meters distance from the house. Around it is an open polder landscape (300 meters) with a treeline. The skybox and treeline don't add that much overhead (checked with Renderdoc). The nearby trees do (alas).
I meant with a stereo skybox you could render trees at visually different distances (e.g. 5-25m) and your current skybox background at infinity. The only drawback is that there's no motion parallax since it's a static skybox, so the effectiveness depends on your scene. If you use teleportation locomotion the result should be great. Linear movement can be a bit hit and miss.
@Tolin93 Thanks for the suggestions. I always use linear movement. Sounds interesting though. Any weblinks/youtube videos with more details on your technique?
@maxBr I don't know of any videos or posts on that technique specifically, but essentially you'd use something like https://github.com/opamp77/StereoCubeMapImporter It has a stereo cubemap material that'll take 2 UE cubemaps (one for each eye), as well as a tool to convert regular stereo panoramas into 2x UE4 cubemaps.
So the way I'd approach it is to hide the house and everything in it, so that only your 20 trees and the background is visible. Then I'd use https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Platforms/VR/StereoPanoramicCapture to capture a stereoscopic panoramic image of the scene, use this image with the StereoCubeMap importer. Delete all trees and replace the flat skybox with the newly created stereoscopic skybox containing all your trees.
If all goes well, your scene should now have a bunch of great looking trees in "3d" outside with minimal performance impact.
