The screenshot looks more like grass so seeing the video, I was really impressed when I saw that what looked like simple clumps of grass were all actualy seperate trees :)
Yeah, my trees aren't exactly realistic (they're programmers art). Though if a forest gets dense enough, it will end up looking like a carpet of green no matter what you do :)
Are you using Eihort 1.4 or the dagon version of ogre. Were actually developing a bmax Ogre solution alongside a long term commercial project and just moved over to eihort.
It should work on both Dagon and Eihort; I'm using Eihort currently. There were a few porting issues, all which were easily resolved.
Are you using static geometry for your forest, our project uses a lot of lego like bricks and were really excited about hardware instancing on PS2.0 capable GPU's as well as the streaming media in ogre 1.4.
Yes, it supports static geometry, entities, and impostors. The screenshots/videos are using static geometry near the camera, and impostors in the distance.
It also has some dynamic capabilities, allowing certain pages to be reloaded in real-time.
However, since it's designed mainly for trees, grass, etc., the impostor system may not work perfectly for a lego-block style game (though I guess it can't hurt to try). Of course, all stages of rendering are optional (you can set up LODs any way you like).
Your forest looks very impressive indeed, will you be releasing it in some form eventualy?
It's already a free download under CVS, ZIP, and RAR forms :) You can find it under the "[solved] Expansive, dense forests" thread in the "Using Ogre in Practice" forum. It's released under the zlib license, which basically means you're free to use and modify it however you like.
Here's a link to the thread also: http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=24918&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=175
And to save you from sorting through an 8-page thread for download links, here they are:
ZIP Download
RAR Download
I'm currently working on infinite tree area support (you could have playing areas with trillions of square miles this way). It already pages the geometry to save memory, but I'm still improving it :)