take a look at this...

[knackered]

http://www.blueberry3d.com/bb3d2002/.../downloads.htm

Stunning, don't you think?

[MickeyMouse]

only wonder how real-time it really is...

[JustHanging]

I wouldn't be surprised if it was realtime, after all the terrain is quite simple. The trees have pretty much detail in them, but I guess they're turned into billboards in the distance, so it's not that bad. I think the main reason why these images look good is good artwork.

-Ilkka

[knackered]

I suggest you download one of the movies - the detail is astonishing...imposters are only used for really distant objects. Each tree gently sways in the wind in a very realistic fashion. The roads must be spline based, because they are very nicely curved without any perceivable poly edges.
Bear in mind this is running on a multigen system.

[Adrian]

I thought the screenshots looked quite good but not that special. After having seen one of the movies though I changed my opinion it is amazing.

[Tom Nuydens]

About 4 seconds into the benchmark.avi movie, you can very clearly see them fading from real geometry to a sprite (or from one sprite to another?) on a tree that's right in front of the camera. So they may not use an impostor for nearby trees, but they certainly aren't drawing them as pure triangle meshes either. It looks like they have three stages: full geometry -> sprite-based foliage -> full impostor.

-- Tom

[knackered]

If you read some of the docs and faq you'll see that a lot of the geometry (such as trees, and terrain detail) is procedurally generated at view time. This makes it even more impressive.

[Silent Bob]

If you're into real-time forests, check this out:
http://www.idvinc.com/speedtree/version1.4

There's a few screenshots and a high and low detail movie.

Cheers!

[zed]

i stuck up a rant on my page about this last night (at bottom) http://uk.geocities.com/sloppyturds/kea/kea.html
i believe this is the way of the future of cg + have been putting in a lot of experimentation