Adding Vegetation

Open 3D Engine (O3DE), the successor to Lumberyard, is now available in Developer Preview. Download O3DE or visit the AWS Game Tech blog, O3DE Discord, or O3DE GitHub to learn more. The Lumberyard forums have been deprecated. You may view past forum discussions in the archive.

You can add realistic trees, bushes, grasses, and other vegetation to your Lumberyard terrain.

Topics

• Vegetation Best Practices
• Vegetation Recommendations
• Vegetation Texture Mapping
• Adding Trees and Bushes
• Adding Grass
• Adding Vegetation Bending Effects
• Vegetation Parameters
• Vegetation Debugging
• Using SpeedTree 8 for Lumberyard

Vegetation Best Practices

Keep in mind the following best practices, recommendations, and guidelines when you add vegetation to your terrain level.

• Manually place vegetation to get the most control and best results.

• To save memory, place grass manually.

• Keep the polygon count for grass blades as low as possible.

• Do not exceed a diameter of 8 meters for grass patches. This size provides a balance between performance and coverage.

• Grasses and small plants do not require specular or opacity texture maps. For more information, see Working with Textures.

• Set the Opacity texture at a much lower resolution than the other maps.

• Use a Glossiness value of 8 or above for realistic results.

• Use the automerged method to apply wind bending effects to grass.

• Use a maximum of 72 bones per tree for touch bending.

Vegetation Recommendations

The following settings are recommended when creating vegetation in your DCC tool.

Vegetation	Polygon Range	Texture Size	Proxies	Material IDs
Grass	0-300	512x512	Bending	Grass, grass proxy
Bushes	300-600	1024x1024	Bending, collision	Leaf, leaf proxy
Small Trees	600-1000	(2) 1024x1024	Bending, collision **	Trunk, leaf, leaf proxy
Large Trees		(2) 1024x1024	Bending, collision ***	Trunk, leaf, leaf proxy, trunk proxy

** Smaller breakable tree trunks are physicalized.

*** Larger non-breakable tree trunks are not physicalized.