SpeedTree

[Fuzzykins]

I HAVE to share this. It's awe inspiring.
http://www.youtube.com/user/SpeedTre.../0/6MDGt9XNS7Y
The program is called SpeedTree. It was used to create the trees in Avatar, along with a variety of games. I was absolutely blown away by this video. It almost looks better than real life. :O
Anywoo, just thought I'd share this with the community.

[Deleted]

Damn... This makes wows trees looks like minecrafts trees..

[eternalwhitemoon]

I'm pretty sure a lot of home computers would have a seizure trying to render this the way it's depicted in the video.

They're really pretty!

[Deleted]

give a few years, thats what game will be like..

[CaspianRoach]

I'm pretty sure a lot of home computers would have a seizure trying to render this the way it's depicted in the video.

They're really pretty!

No, not really. Some games already use this technology, for example, Homefront does.

[Plasmon]

That looks awesome.
There's another similar program that generates large amounts of very realistic foliage (forests and fields) called GroundWiz. I'm mentioning it because you can download it to see how much it cripples your system. They have a benchmarking/demo called "Gugila GroundWiz RTS 2.1" available and It's pretty taxing on even the best systems... Sandybridge w/ 500 series Nvidia gets like ~15 FPS depending on the resolution. I found the benchmark at Guru3d.com.

[Hanto]

Wow. That does look pretty freakin' nice.

[apepi]

Looks pretty nice.

[Herecius]

Oblivion actually used Speedtree. Too bad it makes 'em look like garbage when they're far away. This looks like a good update to the middleware though.

[Fuzzykins]

I want to mess with it but it's stupidly expensive. *No allusion to pirating here, as I couldn't find it, and I wouldn't anyway.*

[Plasmon]

Synthaxx you could try the GroundWiz bench/demo on that beast! Here, I'll make it easy:
http://www.gugila.com/products_gwrts.php

[Plasmon]

Maybe it's really 2D looking when you have tessellation off... this software heavily utilizes tessellation. I don't find it nearly that bad and I think it's generations in quality above WoW's foliage, or nearly any game's foliage. The close-up textures aren't really the star of the show and I think it's more about the realism in the way the grasses and leaves/branches sway in the wind and also how infinite fields or forests can be generated with a seemingly infinite draw distance due to the mechanics of only needing low complexity at far distances and massively increasing complexity as objects get close enough to observe that level of detail. It reminds me a lot of Nvidia's Endless City demo, except focusing on nature and realism rather than futuristic industrialism.

The benchmark and demo are jerky for me too, but I figured it's because I get pretty low FPS, and considering I have a i5 2500K and GTX 560 that's something I wouldn't expect to see on this system. I don't think it's a very well optimized program, but I still think it looks good. Although, the program doesn't look nearly as good on my system as it does in their demo video they have on their website and on youtube. They probably recorded it with a Quaddro or some kind of professional GPU.

[Supernovà]

give a few years, thats what game will be like..

idd lets hope we live to see it.

[DeltrusDisc]

HOLY.... that program would probably break my 9800 GT. XD