2025-11-11 –, Iberico
Whether you're working on a stylized open-world game or a realistic landscape visualization, vegetation will be a major part of your application's graphics. But it's also uniquely tough to create and render: diverse habitats, delicate geometry, complex shading, and unique animation require an entire toolbox of tricks to look good. In this presentation, we'll showcase our easy and free workflows for creating 3D assets of realistic foliage and trees, reveal the most important shading tricks to get them looking great, and touch upon the use of impostors for level-of-detail.
During the development of our large-scale landscape visualization with realistic graphics, we have gained extensive experience with vegetation rendering in Godot. We share our insights in this presentation, going from an overview over the challenges of vegetation rendering to specific solutions. We'll present our asset creation pipelines for grass and trees using open source tools such as EZTree and Blender, and we'll also showcase our process for getting good-looking billboard plants from photographs. You'll get insight into our technology for efficiently scattering vegetation in an open world based on real geographic data, along with the shading tricks we use imitate the unique properties of foliage, with a focus on working with approximated geometry and getting good detail at multiple distances. Finally, we'll present examples of level-of-detail systems and impostors which make the vegetation system feasible for a large-scale open world. You'll leave this presentation with a comprehensive overview over the systems and shading methods needed for rendering foliage and trees in Godot, along with insight into a full production-ready large-scale vegetation rendering system.
After studying Computer Science and Game Engineering, I took that knowledge to an unusual place: not into the game industry, but into the institute for landscape development at the BOKU University in Vienna. Since then, I have primarily been working on a landscape visualization which we use in studies on collaborative landscape planning with a focus on climate change, biodiversity, and renewable energy. We develop this visualization with Godot, which is why I also maintain the open source Geodot Plugin, a tool for loading geographic data into Godot at runtime.
I am currently working on my PhD with the working title “Virtual Nature: Perception, Modelling, Processing, and Rendering of Vegetation and Biodiversity in Digital Experiences and Landscape Visualizations.” On the side, I teach a class at a game development college focusing on Godot and shader programming. I share some of my material for that course on my website hexaquo.at.
At GodotFest 25, Karl will present on large-scale vegetation rendering in Godot, sharing insights from developing realistic landscape visualizations. This talk will cover workflows for creating 3D assets of realistic foliage and trees using open-source tools, shading techniques for vegetation, level-of-detail systems, and impostors for large-scale open worlds. Attendees will learn comprehensive approaches to rendering foliage and trees in Godot for both stylized and realistic applications.