System vegetation

Opensimulator: Documentation: Asset types: System Vegetation

System vegetation is a special form of procedural models intended to create plants with a lower streaming cost than those made from prims, sculpts or mesh.

The models are generated by the viewer, mostly from predefined values and data stored in two xml files, grass.xml and trees.xml. that are included in the viewer download package and located in the viewer's app_settings subfolder. Only a few parameters are delivered from the server. This of course means that the load the plants put on the servers is all but negligible. This is however not quite true for the viewer. System vegetation is always farily simplistic and not likely any serious stress to any modern client computer. But even so, neither the code nor the mesh generated are well optimized.

There are two basic kinds of system vegetation "Trees" (really any single plants) and "Grass" (really any multi plant ground cover).

The main problem with system vegetation, however, is that it's way outdated. It was developed as early as 2002 and apart from the addition of one more ground coverage option it has never been updated. A lot has changed to computer graphics since then and although system vegetation isn't completely irrelevant most of the variants do not meet the expectations to visual quality people tend to have today.

Physics

System vegetation is always phantom.

Textures

Textures are one of the main shortcomings of system vegetation. Alpha cutout texture were harder to make and rarer to find back in 2002 than they are today. Linden Lab had to make do with whatever they could scrape together which resulted in a rather mixed bag of styles and qualities. Most of the textures seem to be based on hand-colored illustrations from old public domain botany books, some are cutouts from photos and only a few seem to be specifically created for textures.

Alpha

System vegetation uses alpha masking and was the only element of Second Life and Opensimulator to do so until new materials were inplemented in 2013.

UUIDs

The UUIDs for the various variants are the same in Second Life and Opensimulator and can be found in the xml files.

Grass

A piece of system grass consists of 32 flat panels with a picture of some sort of vegetation on them. The panels will always be aligned with the system terrain and can not be moved vertically. Nor can the panels be resized; changing the vertical (z axis) scale has no effect and changing the horizontal (x and y axis) scale will change the distance between the panels.

Variants

There are six (really only five) system grass variants:

• Grass 0 Yellowish-green grass with straws.
• Grass 1 Dense cluster of poorly masked grass.
• Grass 2 For most practiucal pruposes identical to Grass 0. It uses the same texture but is slightly bigger.
• Grass 3 Similar to Grass 1 but lighter color and bigger.
• Grass 4 An "autumn variant" of Grass 0/Grass 2. Bigger and with reddish-brown colors
• undergrowth_1 Small alder(?) shrubs.

Parameters

The parameters delivered by the server are type, location, scale and rotation. The parameters stored in the grass.xml file are:

• name
  • The name the plant is given in the edit/build palette.
• species_id
  • A unique number for each type of plant on the list.
• texture_id
  • As the name implies: the UUID of the texture to be used.
• blade_size_x
• blade_size_y

The exact placement of each panel relative to the others is random. All other parameters are predefined and can not be altered.

UV mapping

The UV mapping for the grass is simple, just a single texture covering the whole map.

Level of Detail

System grass does not seem to have any LOD simplifications, it's render in full at any view distance.

Trees

A system tree is a single plant and there are 21 variants. Most of the names are self-explanatory:

• Pine 1
• Oak This is not actually an oak at all but a small maple with orange autumn leaves.
• Tropical Bush 1 Looks like some sort of palm shrub.
• Palm 1
• Dogwood
• Tropical Bush 2
• Palm 2
• Cypress 1 Not really a cypress. The texture used for the foliage is from a cypress but the canopy shape is typical for genereic hardwood trees and not like any common type of cypress.
• Cypress 2 Not really a cypress. The texture used for the foliage is from a cypress but the canopy shape is typical for genereic hardwood trees and not like any common type of cypress.
• Pine 2
• Plumeria A seriously oversized flowering shrub.
• Winter Pine 1
• Winter Aspen
• Winter Pine 2
• Eucalyptus
• Fern
• Eelgrass
• Sea Sword
• Kelp 1
• Beach Grass 1
• Kelp 2

Not all "trees" have trunks and branches but for those that do, they are made from twisted cylinders with nine vertices around the circumference and ten along the length. Foliage is made from several pairs of crossed panels.

In Second Life system trees are assigned a random size when rezzed, on opensim the nominal size is always 4x4x4 m. The actual size depends on several of the parameters from the XML file and is different from the nominal one, sometimes very different. The plants can be resized in-world. In Second Life max size is 10x10x10 m on opensim it's the same limit as other objects (configurable in the server but 256x256x256 m as default).

Parameters

The parameters delivered by the server are type, location, scale and rotation.

The parameters stored in the XML files are

• for trees:
  • tree name
    • The name the plant is given in the edit/build palette.
  • species
    • A unique number for each type of plant on the list.
  • texture_id
    • As the name implies: the UUID of the texture to be used.
  • droop
    • The angle of the branches.
  • twist
  • branches
    • The number of branches at each level.
  • depth
  • scale_step
  • trunk_depth
  • branch_length
  • trunk_length
    • The nominal length of the main trunk segment relative to the plant size. The actual length is slightly higher than the nominal but not significantly so.
  • leaf_scale
  • billboard_scale
  • billboard_ratio
  • trunk_aspect
  • branch_aspect
  • leaf_rotate
  • noise_mag
  • noise_scale
  • taper
  • repeat_z
    • The nominal number of verticle texture repeats along each trunk and branch segment. The actual number of repeats is slightly higher than the nominal but not significantly so.

Level of Detail

The LOD handling is not documented but trees (actual trees that is) have significant LOD reduction for their trunks whilst the branches/canopies don't seem to have any LOD reduction at all. Other plants do not seem to have any LOD simplification.

The trees has a "impostor" function, that is a flat sheet with a picture of the whole plant used as the lowest LOD model. This function isn't currently enabled though and may never have been implemented.

UV mapping

A system tree texture atlas

Trees use a texture atlas. The bark texture takes up the left half of the map. The foliage texture is assigned to the upper right quarter but for some plants only a small part in the middle is actually used. The lower right quarter is reserved for the impostor texture; see the Level of Detail section above.

Animation

System trees used to have an optional wind animation feature. It was a very simple function, just the whole plant rocking back and forth around its lowest point. According to Linden Lab, the effect has been described as "disturbing" and it was disabled long ago. Singularity eventually reintroduced it but it seems to have been intended more as a fun effect than anything else and no other viewers have followed up.

Creating System Vegetation

Technically it's very easy to create new system vegetation variants although since there is no documentation it make take a bit of trial and error, especially to figure out the exact UV mapping for the tree foliage.

To add your new plant(s) to your viewer, simply add the data to the appropriate xml file and it will show up both it the list of options in the build window and in-world. However, it will only show up in viewers that has the same modified xml files so this is not recommended unless it is for a private place with no visitors. If a viewer comes across a variant it doesn't recognise, it will render it as a Pine 1 for trees or Grass 0 for grass.