3D BLOG/ARTICLES/A WILD HUNT FOR FOLIAGE IN VIDEO GAMES

A Wild Hunt for Foliage in Video Games

Jun 04, 2025

Article by Yuri Ilyin

That was a wild ride, to make vegetation in video games realistic, pretty, and well-performing. Here are some highlights.

Vegetation is a big deal in gaming, and always has been since the arrival of 3D graphics. RenderHub has previously covered this topic in depth, with a number of tools used today for realistic or stylized real-time 3D vegetation.

But let's take a look at how it evolved.

The year: 1997. Hexen II. A dark fantasy first-person shooter (FPS) video game developed by Raven Software, based on the modified Quake engine. Top-notch pre-2000 tech. As one can easily see, the tree in the screenshot is a solid low-poly model, with a very conventional representation of its canopy and leaves. No smoothing, even.

While it is obviously a custom 3D model, not something made from "brushes" (basic building blocks in Quake-related engines), then-contemporary hardware limitations forced developers and artists to stick with low-poly geometry and solid textures without transparency (i.e., alpha channel).

Reference: Hexen II screenshot

But this didn't last too long. A major milestone came in 2001 in the form of Bohemia Interactive's Operation Flashpoint (now known as ArmA: Cold War Crisis). An open-world military simulation game, it featured large forested areas, standalone trees and bushes (although no grass just yet), and a very significant visual distance.

Although visually magnificent for its time, the game had a lot of corners cut, of course. The tree trunks in the forested areas were essentially boxes. And the leaf masses consisted of planes textured with lo-fi photographs of actual foliage, with transparent areas cut out.

What was more important, however, is that vegetation was an integral part of the game logic: tree trunks did stop bullets, and bushes actually diminished the player's visibility to NPC enemies (and vice versa, of course).

Not always, though. It appears that in at least one mission, "elite enemies" squarely ignore the vegetation and mark you for death once you hit the high-value target.

Fast forward to the year 2004, when Far Cry, Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, Half-Life 2, Halo 2, World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and quite a few groundbreaking games were released (did we mention Doom 3? Doesn't seem so).

Far Cry, Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, Half-Life 2, and World of Warcraft are particularly relevant here (probably along with Lineage II, which had been released a year prior).

As much a game as it was a technical demonstration of the then-nascent CryEngine, Far Cry was tailored specifically for rendering large open spaces with a lot of vegetation. In fact, there was a then-fabulous tech demo before the game that was used as a benchmark for NVIDIA cards for a time. Speaks volumes, right?

Reference: A Pre-Far Cry tech demo X-Isle running on GeForce 4 MX460 from 2002

For the time, lush tropical greenery awed and wowed gamers worldwide - those, at least, who could afford hardware capable of running the game.

A more critically inclined eye today will see a lot of cut corners and trade-offs, like totally absent shadows and/or ambient occlusion, but again, it was the year 2004!

Meanwhile, one of the primary reasons for criticism from players regarding Far Cry had a bit to do with vegetation: enemies at times could literally see the player through the vegetation - and their aim was uncomfortably exact, no matter the distance.

In fact, it indeed was an in-game AI setback. The game's rendering and visibility systems had their limitations, which occasionally led to the player being well visible to NPC enemies even when presumably hidden in the thicket. Apparently, this was a purely technical issue related to how 3D rendering worked, and how exactly the CryEngine handled depth.

Reference: Far Cry

The problem reportedly lingered in the later games too.

Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault is very notable not just because of its lush greenery that could compete well with that of CryEngine, but also because it was based on the id Tech 3 engine (which initially powered Quake III Arena), although very heavily modified. Among other things, it had the Havok physics engine fastened in, just like Half-Life 2.

Reference: Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault screenshot

World of Warcraft started out as a mod to Warcraft III, but ended up "somethin'... much... BIGGAH" (as one of the bosses says). Vegetation plays a significant role there, especially since certain zones (well, the majority of them) feature forests in this or that form. Elwynn Forest, Duskwood, Felwood, Stranglethorn Vale, The Hinterlands, Ashenvale - all of these featured densely forested areas.

Reference: World of Warcraft Classic: Duskwood

And whereas World of Warcraft graphics have always been (and will always remain) heavily stylized and toyish, the earliest zones were obviously created with very average hardware in mind (which probably ensured the game's groundbreaking success to no small degree).

This became especially obvious when flying was introduced to the game: while from below the trees looked pretty fine, from above they looked more like a bunch of cabbage heads, consisting of low-poly flats with leafy textures. For 2004 it was sort of okay. But already two years later, not exactly.

Meanwhile, the more realistic (as much as it makes sense to speak of realism in an anime-themed title) graphics of Lineage II (2003) held up much better.

The following milestones were The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

Oblivion got people fascinated with its early screenshots depicting what looked like extremely detailed foliage where every leaf and every grass blade was distinctly visible. The actual graphics proved to be very good. Not too fascinating, but it did deliver - unless you started judging it with extreme prejudice.

Soon enough, you'd notice that when there are trees on the horizon, they all have the same silhouette (economy LODs, at your service), and the rich tree canopies are just animated billboards that simply swing a bit. This worked for 2006; however, even this came at a huge cost for the GPU.

Reference: TES IV: Oblivion screenshot

By the way, Oblivion is one of the more efficient examples of early uses of the SpeedTree foliage engine. Not the first, though - the earliest is probably Dark Age of Camelot, a still-extant MMORPG released as early as 2001. Apparently, however, it has had more than a couple of facelifts since then.

For Skyrim, Bethesda Softworks developers, quite surprisingly, ditched SpeedTree in favor of a homebrew foliage system. It looked fine at the beginning (2011), but quickly turned annoying. No surprise that there are multiple mods that replace those weird-looking trees with something much more realistic.

Reference: Skyrim Special Edition with a forest mod

Finally, The Witcher 3 arrived in 2015 (my, it's been 10 years!). It featured Central European vegetation, Northern European vegetation, and Western European foliage as well - all fascinatingly rich, well-animated, and surprisingly well-optimized.

Reference: The Witcher III: Wild Hunt

Probably around this time, real-time foliage struck gold. Everything that came after might have been more high-poly, more detailed, better performance-wise, but not groundbreakingly so.

Basically, it took 20 years for real-time foliage to evolve from necessarily stylized to a modern, movie-like look, from low-poly lumps to what looks like per-leaf rendering. Actually, a wild and victorious journey.

Is there something actually groundbreaking around the corner now? Unlikely, but you never can tell.

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S_AlexanderSun, Jul 13

Karma: 564

Nice article!
I would say that the WItcher 4 tech demo trees seem pretty groundbreaking as well. We will have to wait and see how they will be implemented in the actual game though.

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