PagedGeometry v1.05 - High speed forest rendering

[JohnJ]

What is PagedGeometry?

The PagedGeometry engine is an add-on to the OGRE Graphics Engine, which provides highly optimized methods for rendering massive amounts of small meshes covering a possibly infinite area. This is especially well suited for dense forests and outdoor scenes, with millions of trees, bushes, grass, rocks, etc., etc.

Paged geometry gives you many advantages over plain entities, the main one being speed: With proper usage of detail levels, outdoor scenes managed by PagedGeometry can be >100x faster than plain entities. Another advantage is that the geometry is paged; in other words, only entities which are immediately needed (to be displayed) are loaded. This allows you to expand the boundaries of your virtual world almost infinitely (only limited by floating point precision), providing the player with a more realistically scaled game area.


Features
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[Falagard]

Nice. I downloaded the source, but is there a compiled demo for the lazy? I'm not currently set up to compile this (Ogre is out of date, etc.).

[Kencho]

Very nice looking I'm glad to see it finally reached v1.0

[Mr_Ridd]

This is excellent. Although I was a bit disappointed when the leaves didn't rustle and break off when you walked past them

Well done.

[JohnJ]

Nice. I downloaded the source, but is there a compiled demo for the lazy? I'm not currently set up to compile this (Ogre is out of date, etc.).

PagedGeometry v1.03 precompiled examples - 3.99 MB
Includes precompiled examples only

Keep in mind that the art in the examples is not very good, since their main purpose is to demonstrate PagedGeometry's use.

Examples 4 and 7 are probably the only two examples worth looking at, BTW. The rest are mainly demonstrating non-visual features, like PageLoader's, etc.

This is excellent. Although I was a bit disappointed when the leaves didn't rustle and break off when you walked past them

I may have to save that feature 'till v2.0, but I'm sure it will be included eventually

[Evak]

heh, wow thats really cool . I had a lot of fun painting the trees on the terrain and the grass was really nice indeed. Well done, I hope we can figure out how to make use of some of this tech in Flow.

[KungFooMasta]

I just ran the demos, I really liked the grass in demo 4, and the flying around in demo 7. Cool!

painting the trees on the terrain

You got to paint trees?

[JohnJ]

You got to paint trees?

Try using the left/right mouse buttons in Example 5

[bibiteinfo]

Nice work and demos

[WolfSpinach]

I assume you could use a system like this for doing fur? I'm thinking sort of like Conker or Viva Pinata.

[Falagard]

I assume you could use a system like this for doing fur? I'm thinking sort of like Conker or Viva Pinata.

You'd be better off with your artists creating polygon fins with alpha blended textures for fur on a model Conker used a traditional fur shader, Viva Pinata used geometry for the paper effect.

Either of which are pretty off topic for a tree/grass loading and rendering system

[KungFooMasta]

Adding and removing trees in real time, this library rocks!! I was wondering how this could be easily incorporated into an editor type application. No need to wonder anymore.

[WolfSpinach]

I assume you could use a system like this for doing fur? I'm thinking sort of like Conker or Viva Pinata.

You'd be better off with your artists creating polygon fins with alpha blended textures for fur on a model Conker used a traditional fur shader, Viva Pinata used geometry for the paper effect.

Either of which are pretty off topic for a tree/grass loading and rendering system

I was just wondering, since grass is normally generated in 3D programs by using a hair simulator, why not reverse the process.

Of course there are significant differences and hair-sims are normally a separate render pass, but I know very little about real time rendering pipelines, hence the question.

Of course, this is very impressive in its current form, especially the real time feedback.

[betajaen]

Wow.

Combine this puppy with a soft body physics system for close range trees (PhysX, hint hint) and my jaw will become dislocated.

[nullsquared]

Wow! It looks really nice, and at the same time runs crazy fast (mainly demo 7)! (min: 98FPS max: over 400FPS - 1440x900, 8x AA)

[sinbad]

Woohoo, congrats on reaching version 1.0! Looking fantastic.

[shodan]

Looking forward to giving this a whirl, congrats on the release

[Yaniv]

The screenshots and videos are amazing!
This looks almost as good as the stuff they do in farcry. The only thing missing is some movement to the trees. I wonder, since the trees aren't entities do they support animation? What about event driven animation?

[REiNDEeR]

Wow it really improved alot since the last time I checked, I amost dont notice the switch to imposters anymore also the grass is looking great.

Maybe its a little too fast Sometimes when I move everything just dissapears, I think it has something to do with the time between 2 frames being zero.

I found this in Ogre.log, notice Worst FPS:

Code: Select all

Render Target 'PagedGeometry Example 7 - Lightmaps' Average FPS: 1050.18 Best FPS: 1309.69 Worst FPS: 2.32831e-007


[capture]

Looks very cool. I added this to my blog.

[JohnJ]

Thanks for the feedback

This looks almost as good as the stuff they do in farcry. The only thing missing is some movement to the trees. I wonder, since the trees aren't entities do they support animation? What about event driven animation?

Currently you can only animate batched trees (BatchPage) through a custom vertex shader. In the future I plan to take advantage of Ogre's instancing and implement a InstancePage, which should support animations.

Maybe its a little too fast Sometimes when I move everything just dissapears, I think it has something to do with the time between 2 frames being zero.

The PagedGeometry engine itself can handle 0 length time steps fine, but I forgot to account for that in the demos' delta-time based movement code. I guess it never occurred to me that the demos would be running over 1000 FPS

I'd enable vsync or turn up the screen resolution / anti-alias settings to avoid the high frame rates for now.

[REiNDEeR]

The PagedGeometry engine itself can handle 0 length time steps fine, but I forgot to account for that in the demos' delta-time based movement code. I guess it never occurred to me that the demos would be running over 1000 FPS

I'd enable vsync or turn up the screen resolution / anti-alias settings to avoid the high frame rates for now.

I just tested, it happens with vsync turned on too but not that frequently.

edit:
Something wrong with Ogre::Timer.reset() I guess, I replaced it like this and its working fine now.

Code: Select all

/*
static Ogre::Timer t;
Real timeScale = t.getMilliseconds() * 0.1f;
t.reset();
*/
static Ogre::Timer t;
static unsigned long oldTime = t.getMilliseconds();
unsigned long tt = t.getMilliseconds();
Real timeScale = (tt-oldTime) * 0.1f;
oldTime = tt;


[tau]

Awesome job!

Runs very well and fast under DirectX.
However, I'm experiencing artifacts(slow rendering speed, red bark, black leaves, white grass) under OpenGL (ATI X800, WinXP, latest OpenGL drivers) and I think it's related to Ogre, not PagingGeometry

[Chris Jones]

Congratulations on the release, it looks great. i think i will be using this in the future

[mr.Zog]

Great work!


I've tested the samples, the lightmap demo looks a bit weird in openGL (all tree-leaves are black )