I was reading about deco layers in the Unreal engine:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/CreatingDecoLayers
It looks like they use a "density map" to indicate where the foliage is. This is better than storing 10,000 instances of a mesh on the terrain. Presumably, you just input the player position on the terrain and generate a somewhat random distribution of foliage around them.
Any ideas on how I can procedurally a circle of foliage positions around the player? The foliage would be the same if the player left and came back, but I want to do this without storing 10,000 instances of foliage...I just want to be able to input a random seed or something, and have all the foliage instances get generated.
I supposed you could treat each pixel as a discreet area, and input the x and y pixel coordinates as the random seed, then use that to generate some number of foliage instances distributed across the area of that pixel...but I have a feeling there is a better way to do this.
Also, I'll need to z-sort the instances, so keep that in mind...maybe there is a way of generating the positions "radially"?
http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/CreatingDecoLayers
It looks like they use a "density map" to indicate where the foliage is. This is better than storing 10,000 instances of a mesh on the terrain. Presumably, you just input the player position on the terrain and generate a somewhat random distribution of foliage around them.
Any ideas on how I can procedurally a circle of foliage positions around the player? The foliage would be the same if the player left and came back, but I want to do this without storing 10,000 instances of foliage...I just want to be able to input a random seed or something, and have all the foliage instances get generated.
I supposed you could treat each pixel as a discreet area, and input the x and y pixel coordinates as the random seed, then use that to generate some number of foliage instances distributed across the area of that pixel...but I have a feeling there is a better way to do this.
Also, I'll need to z-sort the instances, so keep that in mind...maybe there is a way of generating the positions "radially"?