Tree Resources

Hello All,

I'm starting a new thread because despite searching for hours on here and racedepartment I can't seem to get anywhere. I've wasted far too many hours searching!

For my Pinwheel Circuit, I'm working on replacing some Kunos trees taken from Monza and the Ring, however for the life of me I can't seem to find a decent resource for trees with alpha channels that are any good. I have attempted to take photos myself but I can't seem to get the backgrounds crisp enough. I did find one or two from a place called gobotree, however the quality was mixed at best - I only managed to salvage a couple of trees from there despite downloading 20 or so.

I'm willing to pay for these trees, however I'm finding it very difficult to find decent quality ones, particularly pine trees for which I would like to replace the Kunos ones I have temporarily borrowed. So basically I'm reaching out to you all for help which is, as always, much appreciated! Where do you all get your tree textures? Do you make these from scratch? If so I guess I need to get out photographing and give it another go

Thanks in advance,

John.

 

Look for Textures4ever vol. 8 out in the wild, hopefully there's a torrent of it by now. Its one of the few legit free packs that exists.

 

I found mine here. I used 9 on a dds to reduce the materials in game.
They were very detailed as a single dds but lost some when I did 9 and downsized them.



https://meye.dk/

 

I know the feeling, I spent way too many hours searching and searching for tree textures I like. What's in 3R is a combination of the hunt (and image adjustments as necessary) and some personal creations from photos I took over the summer (I'm ashamed to say how much time I spent analyzing trees during my bike rides). I'll dig through what I have and send some through, however I'm not sure I have many pine. I really struggled in my hunt to find suitable pines and the ones I shot had significant fringing.

 

Thank you all. I have to say, @JrC that is some resource you have found there, a hidden gem. That will be absolutely perfect, I'm going to be a kid in a sweet shop going through those though. I also came across the Textures4ever series @Johnr777, although as it asks for loads of home information upon registration I wondered whether to sign up or not, so the Meye trees should be a nice alternative as these the photographer, Mikkel Eye, seems to be very generous. Thanks also @Brandydo , only if it's not too much trouble though! Reassuring to hear that there is someone else out there burning the midnight oil searching for that elusive tree.

 

I used block transform for the trees and used 9 on a dds to have the variation but only have one texture to load. Then I mapped each tree type as a master for 9 total then just copied and pasted them to move them around.
I was fighting a battle with DIP and batch size so I went that route.



For van lidar i think i will try a different method for the close to track trees. Maybe do 4 on a texture for a higher res and keep the 9 for distance trees.

Just a thought ive been kicking around.

 

For my first track I picked some images from https://meye.dk/ like @JrC suggested and made some texture atlas with 4 different trees (2048x2048 dxt3).
I didn't test pine textures for now but there are some on that site if I remember correctly.



Then I made some low poly Y trees, and some with more faces.



They are not great but even not too bad in game (my gfx is old )

 

looks good to me. I used those purple ones too on Van for a bit of color if not realism

 

The trick is to find/make/generate good 3D models and then render quality textures and alphas.

That way you also have control over lighting and stuff, so you can get a lighting that works well with the in-game shading/methodology.


There is so much decent stuff (and crap stuff) in the archvis circles now to use as a base.


I’ve made atlas 8x8, and 2 or 3 of them at 4096x4096, so hundreds of variants, small medium and large of multiple breeds, and many variants of each size.


Ie, on FE Riyadh they had loads of a certain palm, so I bought an awesome archvis palm and used that for source to make Y tree textures, normal maps etc, looked great until you stopped and looked up when underneath one (rare when racing haha)

OK true 3D is better, and for a palm quite easy, but some trees it’s a lot of work!

Ie at FE Beijing (Olympic park) they had hundreds of weeping willow near lakes, so I had about 20 variants in one atlas and got great results with X trees with those.
They’d be really hard to do with 3D, well not hard, but heavy on GPU.


Most mainstream games are going to have super real trees soon, Quixel megascan trees and imposters and all that stuff… but for me I can still live with a good Y tree as long as it’s well shaded and textured with good alphas.

Yes if you’re driving under them they fall down a bit, and yeah the trunks can look a bit crappy… but if you’re flying along racing it’s really not a huge issue.


Another big advantage too is when you render from 3D trees, you can render each mip level and get great alpha mips in DDS, vs auto generated in TGA or DDS… and such subtle differences in the alpha can make a huge difference in quality in game as the trees go off into the distance.