Procedurally Populating a Large Terrain with 100.000 Trees | Advanced Computer Graphics | 

While you are correct, aligning with the normal can provide some desired stylized results. I think smaller objects (grass, bushes) look better when aligned with the terrain normal. In my implementation I added a boolean to toggle aligning a particular feature with either the terrain normal or world up. For large objects, such as the tall pine trees, aligning them perfectly vertical looks more natural indeed!

@@Code_Jar Imo it's not just the tall pine trees, but *all* the trees, which need to be pointing upward to look normal.

@@delphicdescant Fair! I also use the normal to ensure trees don't grow on parts of the terrain that are too steep.

Its certainly a hard problem! I love computer graphics as it combines almost all interesting parts of computer science (math, algorithms, data and parallel processing). I did not cover this, but I kind of do keep detail positions! I use a deterministic pseudorandom number function seeded with vectors that remains constant, such as vertex positions of the triangle we are currently placing features on. Moreover, I use noise based 2d masks sampled using a global-position to remove details at points where the value is under a threshold. These methods actually make it consistent enough for my needs, without having to store upwards of millions of grass positions. Also, I want to look into more GPU processing at some point, but I run nearly everything on the CPU currently as the overhead caused by memory transfer between CPU & GPU became too large. GPU collisions among other things are out of the scope of my project, which is why I rely on having mostly everything in regular RAM.

thank you :D

@@Code_Jar i wish i could do this in unity 😞😞

You should be able to! Unity is very powerful in its own right, and it might be easier to write high performance code thanks to the Entity Component System for instance. I aim to be as engine/tool agnostic with my techniques. For instance, nothing I covered in this video is exclusive to Godot.

@@Code_Jar ok

@@M.N.9 and this was made in godot 🤯

@@Code_Jar!!!

Thanks ;) Yeah true! I like aligning along the normal for smaller things like bushes and grass. More importantly, I use the normal to ensure that trees aren't placed on steep areas, I should've mentioned that!

@viniciusschadeck4992 the core idea is the poisson disk sampling in a horizontal plane, then raycasting/raymarching from those positions down to get a position on the ground. Additionally, I use noise masks to visually group objects, as points are deleted where values in the mask are under a threshold.

@@Code_Jar understood now, the key point is this poisson dis sampling, the rest is pure logic, because if you get a sky point and shot a raycast downwards it will eventually hits the ground... but this poisson disk sample are the stuff i have to learn better and implement on my code, i already did generate islands and path using seed and some code, but for trees and rocks i need other type of code, i guess is this one, because making any object placement with perlin or simplex noise are really odd, at least the way i tried LOL