Why are trees so ugly-looking in even the best graphics games?

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David Li

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Mar 12, 2013
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Even in modern games, I fail to find many that have trees/ flora/ vegetation to my liking. Skyrim with several layers of modding is the best I have gotten the trees to look photorealistic.

Is it something about how difficult it is to graphically generate trees? If you had to render each individual leaf and give it its own physics, ambient occlusion, and tessellation, that would be a HUGE drain in performance, wouldn't it? Is the common workaround to have several leaves on a "sheet", then render several sheets? Maybe that's why even BF3 and Crysis 3 trees look like cardboard...

Does anyone have a good answer?
 
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zdbc13

zdbc13

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Feb 7, 2012
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Because God made trees to be a very ugly form of vegetation. They're so grossly big. I prefer small flowers and maybe even bushes but the bigger they are the worse they look.

I'm just kidding and don't want to offend anyone. I think that's a good question and will be interested in what our experts say about it. I took programming classes back in the 80s and we did some graphics programming. It was not easy and I'm amazed at the modern games and graphical systems and the output they generate. I know the game engines do most of the work but I'm curious about the details. Thanks for asking....
 
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ittimjones

ittimjones

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making every detail on the tree takes too much processing power. What type of machine are you running? I think the BF3 trees look pretty good on my machine, but they can't possibly render every branch and leaf because when, say a tree gets blown up and falls down, you wouldn't really be able to just jump through it, so they make them meh instead so that the game is still functional when all the trees in a heavily wooded area are blown up and u have to go through them all. Plus rendering all that would cripple most machines. I know what you mean that most trees in games are kinda sucky looking.
 
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wanderer11

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This will really have two causes: gpu power and programming effort. Video games are made on a budget and they try to do the most they can with that budget. To program a really nice looking tree would mean less time/money to spend on other areas of the game. As far as gpu power goes it would be a huge drain to make a tree sway in the wind with 10,000 leaves all moving individually on 100 branches also moving invdividually.
 
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David Li

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Mar 12, 2013
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Ah, I should have mentioned FC3. Yes, the trees were certainly passable.

For anyone asking, I play on GTX 670 4GB SLI, and have made custom Skyrim creation kit trees that drop my fps to 5 during loading, then back up to 50-60 in the overworld with Sharpshooters ENB.

I love antialiasing, like the efficient multigpu Crysis 3 SMAA. I use AA (but not FXAA, I can't stand the texture blur) whenever feasible, and it makes looking at trees slightly more bearable, but close inspection at different angles of many trees in even high end games reminds me of the Runescape cardboard cutout trees.
 
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