Generated 3d tree meshes

Posted by Jari Komppa on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by Jari Komppa
Published on 2012-12-14T07:14:49Z Indexed on 2012/12/14 11:22 UTC
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I did not find a question on these lines yet, correct me if I'm wrong.

Trees (and fauna in general) are common in games. Due to their nature, they are a good candidate for procedural generation.

There's SpeedTree, of course, if you can afford it; as far as I can tell, it doesn't provide the possibility of generating your tree meshes at runtime. Then there's SnappyTree, an online webgl based tree generator based on the proctree.js which is some ~500 lines of javascript.

One could use either of above (or some other tree generator I haven't stumbled upon) to create a few dozen tree meshes beforehand - or model them from scratch in a 3d modeller - and then randomly mirror/scale them for a few more variants..

But I'd rather have a free, linkable tree mesh generator.

Possible solutions:

  • Port proctree.js to c++ and deal with the open source license (doesn't seem to be gpl, so could be doable; the author may also be willing to co-operate to make the license even more free).
  • Roll my own based on L-systems.
  • Don't bother, just use offline generated trees.
  • Use some other method I haven't found yet.

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