Thomas Kole’s Trick To Render Massive Forests Using Shaders
Technical artist Thomas Kole has shared a thread on Twitter detailing a shader-based solution to rendering massive forests in Cycles. The results are stunning, and the best part is that these forests are “cheap” and effective to render.
Cheap and effective to render, terrible for productivity #b3d pic.twitter.com/C7vRZvx31X
— Thomas Kole (see ? and ?) (@ThomasKoleTA) February 14, 2022
I'm generating little view aligned islands based on a voronoi pattern. Each island is shifted and rotated a bit for added randomness. The islands are also dither-blended, which works well with a renderer like Cycles pic.twitter.com/VACblaoycT
— Thomas Kole (see ? and ?) (@ThomasKoleTA) February 13, 2022
The technique is based on generating view-aligned islands based on a Voronoi pattern, which then have pre-rendered tiling textures applied to them.
It looks a little weird while close-up orbiting, but "drone style" shots work surprisingly well. pic.twitter.com/Wsd3Vrq86u
— Thomas Kole (see ? and ?) (@ThomasKoleTA) February 13, 2022
Check out the full Twitter thread for more information on the link below, and follow Thomas for more technical insights!
Would have been nice to learn how exactely he makes each cell texture rotate *individually* facing the cam. Sure I can use the object node, but it applies on the whole texture.
Hi Thomas, this looks brilliant! – and is exactly what I need for some massive forest landscapes I’m doing for a small movie project – please put me out of my misery and reveal how you are generating the “little view aligned islands” – I spent the last couple of evenings trying to figure it out with various combos of texture coordinates, vectors, normals, geometry nodes, drivers… and failed totally :) – cheers, Stephen Norrington
Lol, he wont probably read your request. He probably isnt aware that his tweet was posted here..
He posted an update with the method and the .blend file!
https://twitter.com/ThomasKoleTA/status/1500897558679408644
And here’s a link to his blenderartists thread including a blend file:
https://blenderartists.org/t/view-aligned-voronoi-islands-for-infinite-forests-eevee-and-cycles/1366131