Free 3-D Tree Generator: Dryad

[Leisure Suit Lurie]

http://dryad.stanford.edu/download.php

free 3d tree (try saying that 3 times fast)

[Hairball183]

It got posted on the C3D forum twice already.:lol:

[TomorrowPlusX]

It produces huge .obj files, though. I assume a good modeling app can simplify that geometry, however.

[AnotherJake]

It produces huge .obj files, though. I assume a good modeling app can simplify that geometry, however.

Results will vary based upon the mesh decimation algorithm being used of course. Maya seems to have a good one, but I've found it does some wacky stuff too. There is a script available for Cheetah3D which seems to be alright, but not as good. Plus Martin seems to be refusing to load mtl files in C3D, so that might present a usability problem there. Maybe this is just the nudge he needed? It would definitely be better if there were a way to lower the poly count during creation. I haven't played with the app myself yet. Just how HUGE are we talking about here? Anything over a couple hundred triangles for trees in real-time scenery seems like it'd be pretty unusable except for central objects.

[Hairball183]

From the C3D forum…

I love how they suggest it as a tool for making trees for games ... yeah 20MB of geometry and 350k triangles per tree... Riiiight.

[AnotherJake]

From the C3D forum…

:blink:

You've GOT to be kidding me!

[Hairball183]

About what?

[AnotherJake]

About what?

Sorry, the quote didn't get quoted:

20MB of geometry and 350k triangles per tree...
:blink::blink:

Do they even make cards that can do 350k triangles at 30fps for the Mac? Regardless, that is utter insanity on a per-tree basis ...

[Hairball183]

Well, considering the fact that it was posted by PodPerson(Space Weasel Game), I'd say he knows what he's talking about.:???:

Edit: and I know nothing about Video Cards, so I can't tell you that.:???:

[AnotherJake]

Edit: and I know nothing about Video Cards, so I can't tell you that.:???:

Hehe... It was more of a rhetorical question. 350K triangles *is* ridiculous for real-time 3D. Considering a wide range of currently available hardware, <50k for the entire scene is probably a more acceptable standard, although there are certainly cards available which can handle much more than that comfortably. I prefer <40k myself for best compatibility with ~GMA950. 7 *times* that for one single object in a real time game, much less a lowly tree, is absurd on basically *any* card.

PodPerson has worked a lot with Unity, so he is very familiar with performance limitations. I haven't visited the C3D forums in a while. I prolly should do a stop-by to see what's up around there...

[macnib]

I tried Dryad a few days ago. Pretty cool. Though, importing into Cheeta3D had some oddities in the model. A few stretched polygons I had to delete.

Ya, not good for realtime graphics. But still nice for rendering billboard images.

[AnotherJake]

I tried Dryad a few days ago. Pretty cool. Though, importing into Cheeta3D had some oddities in the model. A few stretched polygons I had to delete.

That more than likely means that Dryad is outputting incorrectly formatted .obj data somewhere in there. I've tested my obj loader alongside C3D's and I can say that C3D's loader is pretty robust and can handle some fairly odd files gracefully. I think mine is still a little better at handling oddball files than Martin's though -- plus I load mtl files. :p

[OneSadCookie]

Triangle count is only really relevant if you care about GMA 950, up to some upper limit of VRAM/PCIe bandwidth. 500k triangles per frame wouldn't worry me greatly for modern hardware, if that's what it took.

Fill rate (pixels filled) is way more limiting.

[AnotherJake]

So then if there were only one tree in the scene it would be okay on modern hardware I suppose.

[ERaZer]

Some people might want to use it and prerender the trees for 2D games etc.

And free is always free :)

[igame3d]

If it was running on an xbox 360 it would be fine.
When they say "Great for games" they don't mean "on the mac".

Lets see Master Chief in low res mode is a little over 5,000 polys, and you can have
sixteen of him in a co-op game, thats 80 thousand polys, without counting terrain, weapons and effects.

A quick look shows the machine generates 500 million polys per second.

Can't find any details on what a Macs limits are.
Somebody must know.

[AnotherJake]

Can't find any details on what a Macs limits are.
Somebody must know.

I don't know what upper bounds are, but I've convinced myself to stick to low-end modern Macs lately, and with all the varied experimentation I've done in the last couple years or so, 40-50k tris per frame as a rule of thumb seems to be a reasonable figure on the lower bounds of things: Mac Mini (GMA950) and MacBook (X3100).

Xbox 360? Pfft... Totally nutz!

I solved Assassin's Creed last month on the 360 (been playing a bunch of games lately actually). Un-effing-believable how many polys they must be pushing through that. Halo3 was un-impressive by comparison to me. Of course those are merely visual impressions, combined with my limited knowledge of how 3D graphics work. I have no empirical figures on that so I probably shouldn't even be b-essing about it, but WOW!

[Hairball183]

I can't use the thing for several reasons.

a). No dedicated Graphics for me! I have 64MB SHARED VRAM.

b). 512 MB RAM. I still think it's sad when 512MB isn't enough, but…

But I'm not to mad. I mean, I'm lucky to have a computer! I mean, who needs a tree generator anyway. It's not like you can use it with that many tris anyway. Who cares about the tree generator? I'm just fine with what I have. *sob*. Maybe I'll go lay down for a while. *Continues rambling about how he doesn't need a tree generator*.

:p

[igame3d]

I just need a couple of projectors, a few xbox 360's, a dev kit for it, and then I won't have to do any
landscaping this summer, I'll have the best yard in the state!
Virtually best yard at least.

Colorado is set to lose over five million trees from a bug infestation in the next twelve months, its going to totally change the landscape.
Maybe they should invest in this tree generator.

[aarku]

This talented young gentleman made a tree generator inside of Unity that actually makes trees suited for games:
http://yog3d.blogspot.com/2008/01/we-wanted-some-new-trees-for-racing.html

You still have to model the little parts of the tree, I think, but it's the best I've seen besides hand modeled triangle per triangle trees. So I guess if you have Unity you could use this to make .objs for your other games... :/

-Jon

[aarku]

It produces huge .obj files, though. I assume a good modeling app can simplify that geometry, however.
In my experience you just have to model a low poly tree using triangles (not quads) from the ground up. The results have been far better in efficiency and appearance than using any poly reduction algorithm.

[akb825]

It would be useable for games if it had clumps of leaves for each branch as a textured group of polygons rather than having each leaf be an individual polygon/set of polygons. Other than that, it's pretty cool, and could be useful for offline rendering.

[reubert]

It's great that it exists, and it's free.

But... it's so unbelievably slow! That alone turns me off.

Also I would want to use it to generate sprites with transparency which I can use in my games, and I see no way to do that.

And a cocoa interface would be nice, it must be cross platform or something because it's far from mac like.

I see a lot of hard work has gone into it, and it has a lot of potential, especially considering the response it has got here. But no dice from me I'm afraid. I would pay $40+ for this done right.