foliage help

[thelusiv]

Well the foliage system is really coming along nicely I think. Now there are three detail levels of tree models and textures and a static foliage system that makes good backdrops. We now have 4 kinds of trees and I will be adding 3 or 4 more in the next few days. Trees are now randomly scaled up or down a little bit to give them more variety, as well as turned different ways and their types are still chosen at random. Instead of using an RBG color map that can specify different types of foliage, we just have a grayscale treemap that decides how thick the trees are, and the type is random.Something that would add a lot more realism to the trees would be if they threw a shadow on the ground. Since the trees are placed semi-randomly I think the shadows would have to be calculated when the track loads. I could provide a shadow graphic for each tree much like the one for the cars. It would be nice if the shadow could be laid over the terrain as well as the road.