speedtree

Some day, our trees will come...
http://www.speedtree.com/

http://www.speedtree.com/press/PR_Second_Life_Chooses_SpeedTree_March_22_05.pdf

First money trees, now speed trees, where will it end?!!?

But we've got.. Ripple!! + RIPPLE!

Will the speedtrees look better than the trees we have now?

The trees we have now look TERRIBLE!!!!

The way they only have a few levels of detail, and change real abruptly, changing not only detail level but also the entire shape of the tree so that it looks like it is changing species as you approach , looks terrible.

And they pop into view as you fly along in a completely unrealistic and visually jarring manner.

SL Trees Destroy Immersion!

But if it's immersion I want, I should just take a dip is some nice rippling water.

I think so Suezanne, as users will be able to select the source material and alpha the textures themselves. We generally have more time to devote, so I am fairly sure we will see a quality improvement.

As I understand it, Speedtree is what LL uses already, we would just be getting a plug-in.

How many prims will they be?!?

Should be one, just like the current Linden trees and plants.

I'll believe it when I see it. I'm sure it's coming right after Havok2.

Were did you hear that, Nolan?

That seems to be contradicted by the press release, which claims that Linden Lab only licensed the speedtree tech in March 2005 and hope to use it in Q4 2005.

http://www.speedtree.com/press/PR_Second_Life_Chooses_SpeedTree_March_22_05.pdf

"I'm coming to join you elizabeth, With a 5th of ripple in my hand"-Fred Sanford (Redd Foxx)

I could swear a Linden said it, I think what they licensed was for the users to be able to use it as well.

I will dig around and see what I can find.

If I am wrong I will offer my first born prim baby as penance.

Khamon will be along shortly to clarify.

I was wrong, evidently there are a few tree models built into the client, and LL has converted most of the plants to be ready for Speedtree already.

So here is my first born prim baby... please give him a good home, and don't name him Moses or anything!

The current Linden plants are hardcoded models that your client knows how to render inherently. The cool thing they've done is placed the settings for them in a trees.xml file in the Second Life folder on your hard drive. You can make alternate textures, upload them, and copy their keys into your trees.xml file to view the Linden tree frames differently.

They of course function as before, and bear in mind that noone but you can see the different textures through your own client, but it's a total blast. I created a couple and flew around just utterly awed by the fact that I was looking at my world, not theirs. You can see all the linden plants as roses or watermelon vines. Woohoo!

The texture layout is a bit odd. The entire left side is the bark texture that will repeat along the trunk and limbs. The upper right quad is the branch texture that is applied to the multiple branch prims when you're viewing the tree up close. The lower right quad is a flat picture of the full tree that's applied to two crossed prims when you're viewing the tree from a distance.

The reason the current trees look so fuzzy is that the textures are necessarily small. I'm not sure the Speedtree will help that much considering that we'll still have to download the textures. What Speedtree will do is handle the plants calcs as a seperate engine and feed the results into the renderer much like the av, particle and physics engine do now. Do avs have their own engine? I don't know that for a fact.

Eventually, eventually one day we'll be able to create trees with our own textures that we can then give or sell to people. Until then, we'll have to settle for sharing xml files. Is this the kind of info y'all were looking for?

Good info. Thanks.