Do enough polys so it looks good, but not so many that it's just inefficient. I think it'll depend a lot on the type of tree that you're doing. A Willow will have different requirements from a Maple which will be different from a Pine. Concentrate polygons on making the silhouette look good (i.e. more polys along the stem, and fewer around the circumference). And definitely do not skimp on polys for the branches/leaves. Take a look at this guy's trees--they look awesome and are pretty low-poly at around 1400 polys per tree: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1558500&postcount=4026.
You can either clone and place them manually, or make use of "planter" scripts for 3ds Max, such as MousePlanter. Do a quick web search for "3ds Max <your version number> mouse planter". It should bring up some useful results.
If I may be allowed to "borrow" this thread for a question or two: I was browsing through the maps from Brianza and Spa. I noticed that in Brianza the trees have AO maps. Why? I tried having a look in-game to see if I could tell what was going on. It almost looks like the AO map is mixed according to angle to sun (i.e. mixed more when the tree was between camera and sun, and less when the camera was between the sun and tree), and possibly does some tinting based on the ambient color?
The AO maps define how much light each pixel receives, regardless of the billboard direction (which, in a way is the same thing you're saying, but from the opposite point of view). It's a subtle way to make billboards a bit more natural and appear slightly more 3D.
So, it is a dynamic effect? Or would it serve the same purpose to just bake it into the diffuse stage? If so, why not just do that and save the vram? My understand of AO use in games is that it's usually either baked into the diffuse/albedo map or is dynamic. This idea of having a separate AO map doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me (if it's not somehow being dynamically used) from a realtime rendering perspective. Well, I can understand using it on something like car or building--which may use tileable diffuse textures, and require a unique AO map. But, perhaps I'm missing something here with regards to trees...
Depends on the track really. If your trees are far away from track and unreachable, 3D might be useless. I am once and a while building my tree track, and it has trees virtually next to the road so they have to be 3D so that you can collide with them. But my trees are simple, just 3D trunk and planes for leafs.
Hi guys, after today's update the trees in my circuit seem a little off, View attachment 3386 Before the update View attachment 3387 There is any change that I have to do in the parametres for this update?
Sorry, I'm still at work, so I can't check this out myself: but what happens if you re-export the trees using the updated exporter?
I can confirm that. Re-exported everything with new shaders and plugins...but nothing changes. I get a lot of transparency issues on grass decals too...
Graphics in general looks worse than before...and I mean worse than rF1... I so wish the graphics and HDR will get some priority...rFactor2 is losing points in this department at a rapid rate.
I am sure this is just passing "bug" which will be fixed in next versions. This is also affecting trees at original ISI tracks, so I am sure staff already knows what is going on.