Procedural planting: as the scene is explored, plants are procedurally created (planted) over the terrain and discarded when not needed anymore. This way the detail can be enormous.
Planter also supports manual planting: some areas of terrain or certain plants can be pre-planted manually by the content creator for better control. Data per each planted instance is kept to a minimum and many millions of instances can be planted in this way.
Numerous adjustable standard controls: placement density, varying size, orientation, position, etc.
Planter supports over 30 different planting constraints:
- Terrain map layer constraints (slope, height, angle limits...)
- Mesh collision avoidance, Planter self-collision & collision with other planters
- Planter clustering that simulates vegetation grouping effect so common in nature
Automatic LOD (level of detail) handling so that far away objects don't waste polygons and rendering speed. It is optimized to handle a huge number of objects at real-time speed.
Compatible with GroundWiz Planter plug-in for 3ds Max. Some instances can be planted in 3ds Max plug-in and imported into GroundWiz RTS while others are procedurally planted for unlimited detail.
GroundWiz RTS (Real-Time Shaders) Terrain Map
Procedural displacement and tessellation (new since GroundWiz RTS version 2.1):
supported on DirectX11 compatible graphics cards.
Image with displacement tessellation on
Image with displacement tessellation off
Terrain map uses layer tree structure (parent-child relationship) where each layer represents a certain type of ground with its own adjustable constraints.
Transitions between layers are non-repetitive and procedural, based on fractal noise.
Image maps for ground detail (albedo, specular, bump) and layer constraints
Procedural bump controlled per layer with micro detail
Image with all the layers on
Comparison image without and with procedural bump
Micro detail possible due to a procedural nature of maps. It can produce realistic vistas and also show great detail on close-ups.
Far view
Close-up image
Procedural but flicker free; although terrain map is procedural, flickering is almost non-existent and camera movement will not show any noticeable flickering.
Optimized routines of GroundWiz RTS make it possible to render a big layer tree in real-time. Number of layers is optional; in the case of more than 20 layers, it will require shader recompilation.
Speed depends on number of layers; terrain map uses pixel shader loops & dynamic branching to its full potential.
Layer LOD technique: ground can be very detailed by using many layers (ex.20) on high-end graphics cards. On lower-end systems some layers (usually children layers) can be disabled thus trading ground variation for better performance.
Compatible with 3ds Max version of GroundWiz plug-in, possible to directly export GroundWiz parameters from 3ds max and get them running in real-time.
Low data requirements; nothing needs to be pre-baked although users can control terrain map locally in some areas (via vertex color, image masks,...).
