According to the developer, any lag seen in the video is solely due to the recording process. The forest scene runs at a steady 60 FPS (or around 170 FPS uncapped) on their RTX 3080. It’s not just a tech demo: ToniMacaroniy is working on a game.
For terrain rendering, ToniMacaroniy uses the Terrain3D plug-in. The sky is rendered with Volumetric Clouds. Everything else is custom-made. The height map, color map, and grass density map (used to mask out steep hills) were generated in Houdini. The developer also used Houdini to generate points for mid-sized objects like trees and rocks, based on terrain curvature and slope. Currently, no advanced biome or ecological algorithms are used, so the points could be generated directly within Godot as well.
The generated points are saved in a simple binary format, which a Godot script then reads. At each point, the script instantiates a random object from a relevant category using the rendering server. At this stage, all LODs and billboards are spawned simultaneously, with visibility controlled via geometry visibility ranges. If needed, the system may later transition to a grid-based approach.
Grass rendering is handled entirely using a set of GPU particles. This method is difficult to manage, and ToniMacaroniy is considering creating a custom system. This would allow easier integration of grass variants and better resource reuse, such as shared maps, for optimization.
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