Plants, Polygons and Pixels: (godotfest2025)

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Whether you're working on a stylized open-world game or a realistic landscape visualization, vegetation will be a major part of your application's graphics. But it's also uniquely tough to create and render: diverse habitats, delicate geometry, complex shading, and unique animation require an entire toolbox of tricks to look good. In this presentation, we'll showcase our easy and free workflows for creating 3D assets of realistic foliage and trees, reveal the most important shading tricks to get them looking great, and touch upon the use of impostors for level-of-detail. During the development of our large-scale landscape visualization with realistic graphics, we have gained extensive experience with vegetation rendering in Godot. We share our insights in this presentation, going from an overview over the challenges of vegetation rendering to specific solutions. We'll present our asset creation pipelines for grass and trees using open source tools such as EZTree and Blender, and we'll also showcase our process for getting good-looking billboard plants from photographs. You'll get insight into our technology for efficiently scattering vegetation in an open world based on real geographic data, along with the shading tricks we use imitate the unique properties of foliage, with a focus on working with approximated geometry and getting good detail at multiple distances. Finally, we'll present examples of level-of-detail systems and impostors which make the vegetation system feasible for a large-scale open world. You'll leave this presentation with a comprehensive overview over the systems and shading methods needed for rendering foliage and trees in Godot, along with insight into a full production-ready large-scale vegetation rendering system. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://pretalx.godotfest.com/godotfest-25/talk/98N7XU/