Generated 3d tree meshes
- by Jari Komppa
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.
