I just had an idea. say you wanted to make a forest with really nice looking trees, or a bunch of any other sort of semi-cylindric objects, for that matter. I''ve seen a lot of games that would implement each tree as two texture mapped rectangles of equal size placed so it would look like a cross when viewed from directly above (I can''t for the life of me remember the correct term for this right now). that method is incredably ugly, imho. another method would be to actually render each tree, with branches and all, but that would obviously be far too slow. so, and here''s my idea, what if we made a texture of the entire circumference of a tree, and billboarded that with a bit of clever texture-coordinate abuse? you think it''d work? it should be god-awfully fast, but could we make it look any good?

If you are talking about mapping the texture onto a cylinder for every tree, then it would look just about as good as the two texture mapped quads placed together in a cross... This is because, sure, you could make it so that you have every angle looking at the tree and you''d think it would look good, but because it''s a flat picture it would have shadows possibly, making it look wrong. I mean, you could also map on a mask to get rid of the shadows, but that would allow you to see through the tree in between branches... This would be fine if you were actually mapping the trunk of the tree on there, too... The trunk would be another issue, since you could see the trunk from all angles, you would need to have it in the center of the cylinder at all angles... in order to have it in the center you''ve got to have it at every single pixel since you could see it at all angles... This would mean a warped looking fat trunk to a tree that has the same radius... It''s just wrong... You can''t do it properly........ not without having more than one polygon.

S.

This is new. Looks nice too.

I wanrned you! Didn't I warn you?! That colored chalk was forged by Lucifer himself!

yep ild love to have some of those models of trees like these ones http://media.dailyradar.com/images/pc/unrealtech/terrain1.jpg
they look about 100 polys each, anyone know of some models like these on the internet

Pretty good but you can still see that it is a solid trunk with the textured branches and leaves. I guess we will just have to wait a couple of years for 2ghz systems and 1Gpoly/sec vid card. Then I never have to go outside.

I wanrned you! Didn't I warn you?! That colored chalk was forged by Lucifer himself!