The Ultimate 3D Vegetation Creator is a utility based upon and made for use with the free 3D engine Ultimate 3D. It's user interface is based upon the Microsoft .net framework 2.0, which has to be installed before the program can be used. It can be used to automatically create rudimentary vegetation for terrains (like bushes and shrubs). The vegetation gets computed automatically based upon given information. Every piece of vegetation (e.g. every bush) is individual and by default it uses a vertex shader that makes it move in the wind. The resulting vegetation can be saved to a set of Ultimate 3D model files (*.u3d). Every model file will contain the bushes that are within a quadratic area. This way you can disable bush quads that are far away from the camera in your game to gain performance.
Since the functionality of the Ultimate 3D Vegetation Creator has been kept very basic it's use is very simple. After starting the application you should click File->Create. Then a dialog with numerous options will pop up. Here's a list of the options and their meaning:
Terrain height map file:
A gray scale picture defining the geometry of the terrain. At places where the height map is white the terrain will reach it's maximum height, at places where it's black it has the minimum height and at places where it's gray the height is somewhere in between.
Terrain height:
The maximum height of the terrain.
Tile size:
The tile is made up of many quadratic tiles, to allow efficient rendering. This option gives the size of a single tile. This is also the size a single bush quad will have (once the bushes have been exported to Ultimate 3D model files).
Tile count X/Y:
The number of tiles along the x-axis and along the y-axis.
Bushes enabled:
If this is checked bushes will get created, otherwise there won't be any bushes. Not creating bushes doesn't make much sense.
Bush count:
The number of bushes that are to be created. Every bush will have 64 triangles and 48 vertices.
Bush thickness map:
Just like the terrain height map this has to be a gray scale picture. Where the map is white lots of bushes will get created, at places where the map is black no bushes will get created and grey means something in between.
Bush texture:
The diffuse map that will be used for the quads.
Bush size (width and height):
The dimensions of the bushes. The actual dimensions of every single bush vary randomly to reach individuality for every single bush. The values given for this option function as factors.
Diffuse color/Emissive color:
The material color for the bushes. The diffuse color works multiplicative for the light color, the emissive color will be added after applying the light, so it's independent from the light.
After you've set up all these options you can click create. Then the Ultimate 3D Vegetation Creator will spend a short time computing the bush geometry and after that it will show you the result. Then you can rotate the camera by holding the left mouse button and moving the mouse, zoom in or out by holding the right mouse button and moving the mouse and move the camera by holding the middle mouse button and moving the mouse. If you are not satisfied with the result you can click File->Edit (this item has replaced create now). Then you can change all options and recreate the terrain with the vegetation.
To save the result of your work just click File->Save as and choose the directory to which you want to save the set of Ultimate 3D model files. In the given folder one file gets created for every bush quad (unless it doesn't contain any bushes). The bush quads are defined through the tile size and the tile count of the terrain. Every terrain tile represents one bush quad.
Using the created models in your game is easy. Just copy the vertex shader Vegetation.vsh to the effects folder of your game and create model objects from the created Ultimate 3D model files. The x, y and z variables of the bush quad objects need to equal those of the terrain object. You can make the bush quads invisible if the camera is too far away from the bush quad using SetObjectRoom(...) to optimize your game. An exemplary usage of models created with the Ultimate 3D Vegetation creator can be found in the Ultimate 3D Tech Demo.
© Christoph Peters. All rights reserved.