Discussion: optimal and most efficient representation of large forest areas?

CesiumJS
1

Hi community!

I would like to ask this question and thought I get more insight from you in the community.
What would be the best way, we talking rendering and performance vice, of representing large forest areas outside cities?
Say you have this data available:

  • las data

  • stereo images

  • orthophotos

Inside cities we create multiple instances of trees through FME from tree data. But how would you best represent the forest outside the cities perimiters to get the most world like scenario in a model. So you can se vegitation around wind turbines for example.

Would meshes work? Point clouds, maybe scaling up the point sizes? Map forest outlines and randomize hundred to thousands points inside the polygons and instance them with tree like we currently do in cities, then tiling them to 3D-tiles? Any other solution?

Does anyone else have experice with this type of work? I write this question hoping to get as many angels as possible.

Thanks all

2

One high-level hint could be to consider glTF assets with the EXT_mesh_gpu_instancing extension. The idea is that you have “a few” tree models in one file, and just render them thousands of times, with different scales and orientations.

Creating such glTF assets from the raw data that you described may require some manual implementation work. But that approach could have the benefits of high performance (because GPU instancing is fast), and low memory overhead (because you only need few models, and just render them many times).

Another forum user applied that to trees in a city, in the thread around From I3dm to EXT_mesh_gpu_instancing? - #8 by bertt

3

Interesting approach, I will take a look at your suggestion. I try to update here in the future how we implemented forests in our model.