... with some my latest work :-)

Not too shabby! Keep it up..

Nice! A little noise on the terrain maybe?

It looks good. Keep it up!

BTW, all terrain (16x16km) is procedurally generated, including trees and grass.

@evldmn
Noise will be :-)

pretty!

I see many big game developers make shitty forests these days. I'm not saying what you did is wrong, I'm trying to just explain what a good looking forest will look like, and realistic look.
You see, natural forests(virgin forests), and those that are only pathed are very dense. Look at this description picture I made.


RED the distance between trees is usually equal or less than three meters, orig pic: http://imagesfrombulgaria.com/d/113-6/Ea...forest.jpg
Most developers usually make trees that are very distant from each other. They put grass to cover the sparse tree placing. A perfect example of a forest is crysis1( http://tzelun.com/blog/wp-content/upload.../30rc0.jpg ) IMO. Some ppl may say it's a jungle, but maybe they never went out for a mountain walk. A jungle is like a forest with palms and other exotic plants. If it's not pathed and you aren't Bear Grylls you won't be able to walk past those forests. In the pic above you see that this type of forests has very tiny grass. Also you can see the angle of this terrain is ~20° YELLOW, despite that the trees grow 90° straith BRIGHT ORANGE.
Forests are that stacked that you can barely see light when in the centre between trees BLUE, but there are also blank spots GREEN, also you can use some leaves-dirt-sticks texture for the ground like in episode2 http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mac/hl2ep2/osx.png with very short grass.

Thanks a lot for such an advice :-)
However I have to say, that I'm aware of most of things, that you've written - I also think, that most of forests nowadays are bad.
However:
1 - These are the test models, they have about 4k polys each, what is a little too much for a dense forest. Next week I'll have trees with 700 polys (+LOD), that are looking twice as good as those :-) Then I'll make the forest much more dense :-)
2 - Textures are to be changed soon to something better
3 - There are already version with a loooot more (better looking) grass, which looks pretty awesome

These 2 screens were only a tests - it didn't even pretend to be a forest... The REAL forest will come soon :-)

Nice! I'm waiting for them.

Companies space trees apart for performance reasons. Crysis has very optimized trees so it is able to be more dense. But you're right I don't think companies can really use that argument anymore. There is a difference between a forest that is still maturing and a mature forest in the climax stage.