This is a pickup of my previous thread, but thought it would be good to call out seperately.
I have a large (very very large) landscape.
I have three sources of trees:
1) Forest Pack Library (billboards)
2) Various high poly trees (Itoo and elsewhere)
3) Vue --> which outputs trees as a few hundred curved elements each of which has a mapped texture, opacity and bump map. A complicated tree may be as few as 10,000 polygons as a result - but its a hybrid between billboards and hi-res poly meshes (100,000 poly's) and uses opacity maps for its tricks.
So, the question is what to use in my landscape project. I guess there is a trade off between realism, rendering speed and max resources.
My instinct says use billboards for the distance -- and then I don;t know what the view is on #2 vs. #3 above.
Thoughts from the pros? (OH VRAY is the renderer)