The next video in my series to rewrite the way we render vegetation is out today.

In this one I explore pine trees, or the branch tips at least. Last week I set out to create pine trees but ran into performance problems due to the shear scale of pine needles. Easily 1 million needles, needing 10's of millions of triangles.

In this video I look at ways to combat that, and build many more lod's in-between, and drag the rendering times back down (kicking and screaming it feels like ;-) )

full video  [https://youtu.be/M9wdz7GAWKo](https://youtu.be/M9wdz7GAWKo)

  
**Why am I building a vegetation system from scratch when we have Speedtree and Nanite?**  
I am convince that neither classic speedtree (low poly and lod's) nor Nanite is the correct solution for at least a little while.

Low poly alpha cutout vegetation is very badly optimized to render on modern hardware. GPU's love triangle that generate roughly between 32 and 128 pixels each. Anything outside of that range is not optimal, and transparent pixels adds up no matter what we do.

Nanite on the other hand, despite the technical marvel that it is, is just not capable of rendering trees with millions of polygons on current generation hardware. Every youtube video out there show how to drag performance back to 60 fps, when the vegetation should be a small fraction of your total time.

**My solution**

* Render using traditional hardware (its great at rendering), but try to optimize for triangle to pixel ratio to stay in the sweet spot.
* Build many lod's - Big trees will likely have 15. Even small plants and grasses will have 5 or 6. This allows switching without blending or dithering.
* Automate all of these steps to free up artists
* In the art tools - concentrate on performance feedback for real scenes (many plants at all lod's) , not just a single plant on screen.

Rendering pine needles extremely quickly