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I am working on a small game using webgl. Within this game I have some kind of forest which consists out of many (100+) tree objects. Because I only have a few different tree models, I rotate and scale these models in a different way before I display them.

At the moment I loop over all trees to display them:

for (var tree in trees) {

While the display() method of tree looks like:

display : function() { // tree

Many tree objects share the same treeModel object, so I have to set rotation/scale/position of the model everytime before I display it. The rotation/scale/position values are different for every tree.

The display method of treeModel does all the gl stuff:

display : function() { // treeModel
  // bind texture
  // set uniforms for projection/modelview matrix based on rotation/scale/position
  // bind buffers
  // drawArrays

All tree models use the same shader but can use different textures.

Because a single tree model consists only out of a few triangles I want to combine all trees into one VBO and display the whole forest with one drawArrays() call.

Some assumptions to make talking about numbers easier:

  • There are 250 trees to display
  • There are 5 different tree models
  • Every tree model has 50 triangles

Questions I have:

  • At the moment I have 5 buffers that are 50 * 3 * 8 (position + normal + texCoord) * floatSize bytes large. When i want to display all trees with one vbo i would have a buffer with 250 * 50 * 3 * 8 * floatSize byte size. I think I can't use an index buffer because I have different position values for every tree (computed out of the position value of the tree model and the tree position/scale/rotation). Is this correct or is there still a way I can use index buffers to reduce the buffer size at least a bit? Maybe there are other ways to optimize this?

  • How to handle different textures of the tree models? I can bind all textures to different texture units but how can I decide within the shader which texture should be used for the fragment that is currently displayed?

  • When I want to add a new tree (or any other kind of object) to this buffer at runtime: Do I have to create a new buffer and copy the content? I think new values can't be added by using glMapBuffer. Is this correct?

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3 Answers 3

up vote 4 down vote accepted

Index element buffers can only reach over attributes that are equal to or below 65535 in length, so you need to use drawArrays instead. It's usually not a big loss.

You can add trees to the end of the buffers using GL.bufferSubData.

If your textures are in reasonable sized (like 128x128 or 256x256), you can probably merge them into one big texture and handle the whole thing with the UV-coords. If not, you can add another attribute saying what texture the vertex belongs to and have a condition in the vertex shader, alternatively an array of sampler2Ds (not sure it works, never tried it). Remember that conditions in shaders are pretty slow.

If you decide to stick to your current solution, make sure to sort the trees so the once using the same textures are rendered after each other - keeping state switching down is essential, always.

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+1 for texture atlas. Also, I don't think WebGL (well, at least Chrome's implementation on Mac OS, but possible WebGL itself) supports array textures. –  Daniel Yankowsky Mar 18 '12 at 20:34
Merging multiple textures into one is a good idea. I will look into this. Also i didn't know that indexes are limited to 65k. Good Information, thanks. –  micha Mar 18 '12 at 21:20
It's limited to 65k due to the data type (Uint16Array) used for indexed elements. –  MikaelEmtinger Mar 19 '12 at 15:23

A few thoughts:

  1. Once you plant a tree in your world, do you ever modify it? Will it animate at all? Or is it just static geometry? If it's truly static, you could always build a single buffer with several copies of each tree. As you append trees, first apply (in Javascript) that instance's world transform to the vertices. If using triangle strips, you can link trees together using degenerate polygons.
  2. You could roll your own pseudo-instanced drawing:
    1. Encode an instance ID in the array buffer. Just set this to the same value for all vertices that are part of the same tree instance. I seem to recall that you can't have non-floaty vertex attributes in ES GLSL (maybe that's a Chrome limitation), so you will need to bring it in as a float but use it as an int. Since it's coming in as a float, you will have to deal with the fact that it's interpolated across your triangle, and so the value will have minor fluctuations - but simply rounding to the nearest integer fixes that right up.
    2. Use a separate texture (which I will call the data texture) to encode all the per-instance information. In your vertex shader, look at the instance ID of the current vertex and use that to compute a texture coordinate in the data texture. Pull out whatever you need to transform the current vertex, and apply it. I think this is called a "dependent texture read", which is generally frowned upon because it can cause performance issues, but it might help you batch your geometry, which can help solve performance issues. If you're interested, you'll have to try it and see what happens.
  3. Hope for an extension to support real instanced drawing.
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To #1: For the moment the trees are completely static. However i would like to have to option to animate them later without changing everything. I think animation would be another problem with my current approach. Thanks for the "dependent texture read" idea. I will look into this for sure. –  micha Mar 18 '12 at 21:34

Your current approach isn't so bad. I'd say: Stick with it until you hit some wall.

50 triangles is already a reasonable batch size for a single drawElements/drawArrays call. It's not optimal, but also not so bad. So for every tree change the paramters like location, texture and maybe shape through uniforms. Then do a draw call for each tree. Also a total of 250 drawElements calls isn't so bad either.

So I'd use one single VBO that contains all the used tree geometry variants. I'd actually split up the trees into building blocks, so that I could recombine them for added variety. And for each tree set appropriate offsets into the VBO before calling drawArrays or drawElements.

Also don't forget that you can do a very cheap field of view culling of each tree.

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