Chapter 5. Bring Me a Shrubbery
Vegetation has a huge impact on scene quality. Significant coverage was once difficult to achieve without making compromises for memory and rendering power. Early computer games would use single pixels to sell the impression of movement (and sometimes even that was a stretch). Thanks to current Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) technology it's realistic to have lush scenes consisting of 2,50,000 vegetation objects on mid-range gaming PCs.
GROME, Unity, and other game engines all have their own unique vegetation system but broadly speaking they do the same thing; take a single object (such as a tree or grass billboard) and draw thousands of copies at different locations within the scene.
Games commonly use smoke and mirror techniques to fool the eye into thinking a scene is more complex than it is, even using old cinema tricks like forced perspective. The amount of detail we want to include is impacted by the altitude of the camera in our game; a flying game would...
