TREES

[Castano]

Post everything you know and any tips about NWN2 trees here:

also design tips are worthwhile

And when we are done maybe summarize and sticky it?

[Castano]

From Halrin:
I don't know about hwo to properly "do" trees, but heres what i know

1) when placed on slopes, you often need to 'sink' trees slightly so that their trunk isn't floating over a small bit of ground

2) The suggestion is to use no more than 5 types of trees per area, this includes different 'seeds'. A more efficient way of having varying tree shapes is to alter a trees scaling, instead of adjusting its seed.

3) the walkmesh cutter I described above is especially useful around trees

as for how I go about 'doing' trees, I make sure to select my 5 before beginning the area, leaving one of each in the margin area so I can go back to them if i forget.

Also important is to start small and work your way up, Big trees occupy a lot of space when you click on them, so any smaller trees or other objects inside the larger treees selectable area can be impossible to select. Frequent use of the 'Show/Hide' and 'Selection' tabs can make this easier, by de-selecting trees in those lists you wont have to worry about selecting already placed trees when messing aorund with other placables or environmental objects.

Pretty basic stuff, but may be useful to those starting out

[Castano]

I notice that some of the smaller plants that are classified as "trees" in NWN2 cast shadows....for example the marigold flowers....IMO this is a waste of vid card resources.

You can turn off shadow casting in the plant's properties menu. I recommend leaving recieving shaodws on though.

Feel free to chime in if it's not worth the effort to do this (e.g. it doesn't save many resources)

[Audark]

*shrugs* I simply wouldn't use them at all unless they are acrucial aspect to that area.

If something tiny is classed as a tree, that means they take up space like a tree, and also contribute to the suggested 5 tree type max per area. Theres plenty of natural placables to use for groundcover, using a big collection of tiny 'trees' is a waste of resources in my opinion.

That being said, I am building conservatively to allow myself room to expand as best I can, don't let my attitude about things change your mind about designing things the way you want.

[Grand Fromage]

The little plants technically count on the reccomended five, but in reality you can safely use more of them. The reason you want to keep it at five (though seven should work okay now, five was before the tree optimization in 1.03) is to minimize the amount of processing going on. As long as the tree is the same seed, Speedtree can treat it as the same object and thus use less power on it. I don't know the specifics but this is the general idea.

The little shrubbery things take far less resources to begin with. If you were using just shrubs you could use, say, twenty of them before starting to degrade performance.

Also don't stick to five with religious zealotry, it is flexible. You should be fine with five most of the time, but if you need seven for some reason it's not that big a deal.