SpeedTrees with Landscape/Terrain

[marscaleb]

I'm looking to create some landscape, primarily as a background element, that is going to be covered with trees. Speed trees.

First of all, is it possible to just paint speed trees onto my Terrain/Landscape? I recall with terrain I could just paint meshes onto my ground, which let me do things like cover portions with grass. But I don't know if SpeedTrees could be painted like that, and the documentation for Landscape doesn't show any documentation for mesh layers at all.

I've been studying the speed trees, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like the trees I export from there come one at a time. Yet if I wanted to cover a hillside with them, I wouldn't want to use just one mesh. Is it possible to randomize a SpeedTree within UDK, so I can take one pattern and use it to create many trees? (And still have each randomly formed tree look the same each time I play the game?)

[XilenceX]

No afaik SpeedTrees can't be painted onto the surface or at least they loose some of their specialties if you do. No they can't be randomized in Engine and you'd probably have a hard time with all those drawcalls if you could. SpeedTrees are extremely performance heavy as they are see: http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/...bugged-shadows!

[marscaleb]

F*** man, I can't make a bunch of trees as static meshes! That would take up a ****-load of time, and I doubt they would look very nice with my modelling skill.

[jlhill17]

There is a free tree generator similar to SpeedTree called tree-d or something like that. You can export the trees as static meshes and I think you could use them with the foliage paint tool on your landscape.

[mAlkAv!An]

There are progs that can do it for you, or plugins for modeling progs.
e.g.
Tree[d]: http://www.frecle.net/index.php?show=treed.about
3DS Max TreeGen: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=93240
Blender Sapling Tree: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Ex...e/Sapling_Tree

[hunharibo]

Its useless to place even static mesh trees with the foliage tool. Anything placed by the foliage tool DOES NOT have collision. Epic even considers this "working as intented"... I asked and warned about this like a year ago when the new foliage came out. It might be better to actually fix bugs and implement things people want instead of "new features" nobody wants like 3D stereo functionality...

[mAlkAv!An]

There is a workaround: http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/...ion-on-foliage

[marscaleb]

I will take a good at those tree generators. Thank you!
Have you seen a worthwhile one for Maya?

Its useless to place even static mesh trees with the foliage tool. Anything placed by the foliage tool DOES NOT have collision. Epic even considers this "working as intented"... I asked and warned about this like a year ago when the new foliage came out. It might be better to actually fix bugs and implement things people want instead of "new features" nobody wants like 3D stereo functionality...

I won't need collision for my forest; it's really just for background. If I were making a forest that a player was capable of walking in I'd place everything by hand so I could stage it properly. I guess it all depend on what the project is, though. Thanks for the heads up.