Am I beginning to like SpeedTrees?

M

mezzoprezzo

Content appreciator
:eek:

I caught this video on YouTube.

There is no description or details other than “SpeedTree 5.2 wind effects”, so few clues regarding the availability of this high standard of work. I would imagine the load on PC graphics must be huge. Imagine a forest of these!

The example is a particularly good representation of a silver birch. The bark and dead twigs look real, as does the reflective quality and texturing of the leaves. Full shadowing too, both within the foliage and on the ground .

The wind dynamics are particularly effective. You can almost see the air moving through the foliage with the individual leaves moving at different rates and directions as the gust passes through the canopy.

Impressive stuff.
 
That video and others associated with it show an exceptional exhibition of how SpeedTrees SHOULD look. Unfortunately, most of the stuff we see is just clumps of leaves attached to branches and that is exactly what they look like. Some have described them as "cotton-balls" of leaves. Compared to the videos the indigenous N3v/Auran stuff is terrible. Even third party items do not measure up the the videos but are certainly better than what was offered in TS2012. The SpeedTrees we currently have are good icons to represent trees but they are not an accurate representation of the real thing.

Trunda old style trees look like trees but only at some distance. Maybe someday we can get the SpeedTrees shown in the videos!!!
 
Hi casper

I resisted for a long time, but I've jumped on the speed-tree bandwagon.

Don't ever expect a Trainz speedtree to look like those in the vid, but you CAN expect a Trainz speedtree to look considerably better than the built-in stuff, there are 3rd party alternatives aplenty. Well maybe not 'aplenty' but there are a couple of very very good alternate sources.

As to performance from a forest of speedtrees: despite the number of polys (which to an 04 holdout looks terrifying) the way they are implemented in-game makes them amazingly lo-impact. You can have literally thousands of them in view and still run hi-poly rolling stock at very decent framerates.

For a screenshot nut like yourself though I am not so sure. A decent alpha tree carefully 'posed' to negate the billboard edge still kills any speedtree stone dead. Your screenshots prove this, there are lots of good 04 shots in the European Screenshots thread still and other good shots from older routes still appear regularly.

In short: from a performance viewpoint in later versions of the sim, speedtrees win. From an appearance perspective though, a carefully arranged shot using quality billboard/alpha trees rules.....

Andy ;)
 
Last edited:
The video linked-to above is taken in the SpeedTree modeler.

It's understandable that the SpeedTrees that we use in Trainz aren't as detailed as the one in the video, because Trainz is a real-time sim and there can be thousands of SpeedTrees in a scene.

Billboard trees would be better if they used very high-resolution/high-detail textures. Trunda's trees aren't too shabby, but still don't have textures of a high-enough resolution to be the best for close-up shots.

Many of the built-in SpeedTrees are bad. Forget about them. The trees by Pofig, McGuireL and Gawpo50 and a lot more superior, and the trees by the last 2 are the ones that I use.

Check out the payware SpeedTrees by Jankvis in the screenshots in this thread. Those are some incredibly awesome-looking SpeedTrees in Trainz.

Regards,

Zachary.
 
Last edited:
mezzoprezzo said:
:eek:

I caught this video on YouTube.

There is no description or details other than “SpeedTree 5.2 wind effects”, so few clues regarding the availability of this high standard of work. I would imagine the load on PC graphics must be huge. Imagine a forest of these!

The example is a particularly good representation of a silver birch. The bark and dead twigs look real, as does the reflective quality and texturing of the leaves. Full shadowing too, both within the foliage and on the ground .

The wind dynamics are particularly effective. You can almost see the air moving through the foliage with the individual leaves moving at different rates and directions as the gust passes through the canopy.

Impressive stuff.
Click to expand...

Being as I build SpeedTrees with 5.2, I thought I would take a look at the YouTube video you found. I agree with you, very impressive, almost looks lifelike. You may want to check out the full poly count of the tree. I did at large screen res and it has 187,400 odd polys. That is why it looks life like and why it is not a RT (real time) speedtree. For Trainz, we have to keep the poly count, where possible to below 10,000 at the closet distance. That requires quite a few trade-offs to get the poly count that low. I can do the same type of high poly speedtree and it looks awesome but it will kill my system.

Regards
Peter
 
Wow; 145,000 leaf meshes alone! It looks great, but in most routes, you'll probably want to place more than one...
 
I've used the Speed Trees since they were introduced in TS2010. When mcgurel's and Pofig's trees came along, I did a replacement of the built-in horsey looking ones. The 3rd party developments look so much better than the built-in ones, it's truly amazing. Then if you think about it, the built-in versions are only an example of what can be done, and as always the community comes out with something better. :)

One of the things that makes the Speed Trees render so well, is they are rendered mostly in the GPU (graphics processor) on the video card rather than having to be handled by the CPU and RAM first.
With the older alpha-channel flipboards, they have to be loaded from the hard drive into memory, the CPU has to help draw them, then they're uploaded to the video card for display.

The Speed Tree process takes a substantial load off the system and allows the graphics to literally draw themselves without impacting the system as much. The trees are read into RAM then transfered directly to the GPU using DMA calls.


John
 
Hmm what to say 1pict tells a 1000 words

Yes the electric car is coming and yet most people wait and talk till the glider car is re invented like the jetsons right?
what is pefect what illusion supports a close enough environment to feel good and happy with the result?
enough said my world is 3D and always has been and matching stuff the closest is for todays world more than fair and feasable.
I must have probably more than 1k picts to tell 1k x 1k words but the image tells the real story or better the feeling of the image what it tries to tell you how to look at it with your eyes focus set on zero or unlimited than you catch the true magic of pictz.
There is not 1 old 2D tree in my routes and the results speaks for themselves.
Casper I advised you long time ago the rest is up to you.
What else you need to make a small step with a huge impact.:eek:

roy;)
 
I agree that SpeedTreez give a huge lift to any scene on a route (as seen in many screen shots) - but to give me consistency I would prefer to have the trees and bushes still.
I understand there used to be a feature someone did that stopped trees moving - but I believe this is no longer available.
Is this so?
If it is available would someone mind letting me know.
Thanks
Cheers
NickE
 
Yep never off or gone in environment

Nicke,
go to the left menu and look for edit environment and in there you will find how much scale the wind you can set or just to the left off no wind at all.
Can I advice you something more useful in Trainz, do not always Follow or most times rumours or hypes unless you checked for yourself and many times look for things might take times but is very rewarding with results and way of ahndling the game will improve dramatically.
I fully disagree you said you still like bushes and trees old style unless you have tried what I have done on my routes so far. I thik I used most speedtree based trees,brushes than any other trainzer on TS12 and the results in my thread proves this is the way to go of you want to grow.
Hope this helps and most of all next time dig into things yourself like I do 99% on any thing, try first myself and later sometimes compare what other experts have to say about it.

roy
 
nicke said:
I agree that SpeedTreez give a huge lift to any scene on a route (as seen in many screen shots) - but to give me consistency I would prefer to have the trees and bushes still.
I understand there used to be a feature someone did that stopped trees moving - but I believe this is no longer available.
Is this so?
If it is available would someone mind letting me know.
Thanks
Cheers
NickE
Click to expand...

Yes, there is the hack by OTTODAD that disables the SpeedTree wind effect in Trainz. I've used this on my installation of TS2010 for performance reasons (I'm not sure my humble laptop could handle a bunch of wiggling SpeedTrees, but I get fair performance (to me) with the SpeedTrees being frozen), as well as I do not know for sure whether I'd really like them wiggling. Here is his thread on the hack (which, in my opinion, should have been made a sticky): http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?58607-TRS2010-Speedtrees-Fix. Unfortunately, the download link no longer works, but I do still have the ZIP archive on my computer, fortunately.

Regards,

Zachary.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top