We have started a new project set back in the 1800s and back then large shade trees were common in towns and on estates...and i am looking for the best quality chestnut, beech, elm and oak trees that were of that type.
I was reccomended RMM's trees, he appears to be russian and the pictures look very good. I needed to ask also what is the differnce between SpeedTrees and normal tree assets? any tips on this would be appreciated.
and any other recomendations for good quality tree sets by other makers. thanks in advance
Chris
i am not looking for the new normal added 2019 assets for a number of reasons, esp since i want to be able to use older assets of high quality. i am assuming both 2012 and TANE assets will work in TANE
RMM is in fact from Russia. His "Dub" are oaks and work very well. He has many iterations including those beautiful large black oaks with their dark leaves and trunks. His "Klem" are his maple trees. There are various sizes and styles of those as well, although they're a bit on the yellowish color except for one which is a tall form, perhaps as sugar maple.
McGuirel made some maples, oaks and other species including a broad leaf variety which i think fits a multitude of sins.
RMM made some elms. They're not huge trees, but they're typical of the species I suppose. They're called Vyaz.
There's an index available of his trees. I'll post that separately. Deane Dinored.... etc. and Roy from RoysTrainz put that together.
The difference between the two kinds of trees is complicated, but not so at the same time. The billboard trees as they are called are made up of pictures of trees placed in a star shape. The more branches you have the better they look. These were the only way of making trees at one time. They're pretty much outdated now. The problem with them is they will work okay if they are created properly so they don't have individual planes with pictures showing like the trees found in some recent Jointed Rail uploads, but the other issue is due to the load they put on the system its self. These assets require the CPU to render and that causes stutters. I'll get back to this momentarily.
Speed Trees are fast, relatively speaking because they are generated from a library of parts that are rendered mostly, if not all by the GPU or the main chip on the video card. (GPU means Graphics Processor Unit). The GPU today is much faster than the CPU and can handle the complex math required very quickly to render 3d objects. There is also a quick direct link to the GPU/Video card for output, called DMA or direct memory access, that doesn't require a lot of CPU use as well. With primitives in code, for basic leaf-shapes and colors, all this stuff is processed quickly and doesn't require all the extra steps.
Remember what I said about the billboard type trees? Because they have to use the CPU, they go through many more steps to render to the screen. The data gets loaded from the disk (SSD/hard drive any type it doesn't matter), and to memory. The CPU then has to retrieve this asset, do the maths, put the data back into memory for transfer out to the GPU. Unlike the GPU, the CPU is not as quick as they were in the old days in comparison. Video cards in the olden days were actually slower than the CPUs at the time and had very little memory. Today they're faster and have access to very fast memory that's far faster than system memory. These extra steps take time and the calculations take time. These extra steps are also done in conjunction with other things such as running the network, disks, and keeping track of other program aspects such as AI tracking, interactive industries and everything else that's going on.
