Speedtree...

[Funkenstein]

Does anyone know how to use speedtree? Can you paint on the trees in the terrain editor like in crysis or do you have to place them 1 by 1?

Im hoping that UDN will have a tutorial about that soon.

Any Info would be appreciated

[Dekrayzis]

I've had a play around with the speed tree. Not much to say really.

Heres what i've found out.

I opened up the speed tree packages and double clicked on one of the files and loaded up the editor.

You can adjust the height of the tree by altering the seed value.
You can change wind speed for several things.
Show/disable leaves, Fronds, Branches, Billboards???.

Fronds seem to be Branches, and Branches seem to be the actual tree trunk. Why it was named like that i have no idea. makes it confusing. and billboards...Don't know what that is. Setting it to show/hide doesnt seem to do anything.

As for creating your own tree. Not found out how to do that or if its even possible. I was looking forward to creating my own unique trees adding branches in certain places.

Hopefully UDN will provide the missing details soon.

[Funkenstein]

Cool. That part seems pretty strait forward however actually putting trees, as well as plants into a level one by one seems to be troublesome especially if you want to make an outdoor foresty area.

Im hopeing there is a faster way of doing it. Ive fooled around with the crysis editor and the way you can build forests just by painting it in the terrain editor is really amazing.

[Dekrayzis]

Yeah you can do that in Unrealed3, possibly in UT3Editor, by using the terrain generators Decolayer settings.

I'm trying to get it to work, but not having much luck with it.

One word of warning. if you want huge trees, and you scale them up. Becareful. the collision box will block players, vehicles, and pathnodes.
I recently did this with my Primeval remake. Had to to remove most of the speedtrees because of this. Now i'm currently looking for a way to either create my own, or export them out as staticmeshes and create my own custom collision box. alas. not much luck. :(

[Funkenstein]

Thanks for the heads up. If you get speedtree working with the terrain editor please post a few tips for getting it to work ^^

[Kronos]

Speedtrees performance seems to be the best of the bunch, I've placed well over several 100, and my fps seems to still stay at a steady 50 on highest graphics.

One thing thats been puzzling me though is casting more crisp dynamic shadows for them. I have no trouble doing this with anything else such as static meshes, skeletal meshes, and bsp. But the speedtree actor seems to be uneffected by the grounds lightmap resolution, I cant seem to get any better then a simple uggly blob shadow from them, I've tried tweaking with the lightchannels of the light, and the speedtree actor. I'm not getting the results I hoped for.