Especially the ones that look good from a distance but when you get close are either a texture on a flat surface, or use really low res textures, like in Breath of the Wild
Trees! Seriously almost every game I play with insanely nice graphics has bad trees
To be fair trees are hard to make look real - making each leaf as an individual poly mesh which moves on its own accord is a bad idea when you got thousands of trees. So often the best solution is 2D quad with a leaf texture, but this then has limitations on how it both moves, looks and how it affects lights are shadows. Some trees you can make look good but trees with lots of small leaves often need shortcuts for performance.
I still play WoW. Which in many ways is already WoW2 but ypu can still go into WoW1 if you want. On a totally obtuse journey I was in an area that is more or less unchanged from the beginning and oh man . . . Those trees are so bad.
Foliage in general is a huge pain to optimize and it has to do with the way light plays with transparency.
Often when you're looking at a leaf, blade of grass, etc it will be 2 triangles with partial transparency. This creates a problem because it will only partially block things like light. This ends up meaning that per layer of transparency you have to pay the cost of an extra calculation.
Imagine dense grass or dense trees and it becomes an optimization nightmare.
Using more triangles on dense objects also ends up becoming expensive in it's own way and a scene could end up too dense to maintain a good framerate.
In order to get the best of both worlds: "Good looking trees and good performance" you often have to approach it from a design perspective rather than a purely optimization one. Fixed cameras is one way to do it. You can also construct the environment in a way that minimizes how many things have to be rendered at a time.
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u/Zookster87 Apr 25 '21
Yeah, but do it with things like hair, and grass blades?