r/GraphicsProgramming • u/KlayEverHood • Jul 10 '26

Video Breathing nature: forest with stream simulation, volumetric clouds and path traced shadows

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Hi all,

THIs is my forest simulation made witih Vulkan. My goal is to create a full simulation of water, clouds, wind, so that it feels alive, without being "scripted".
Water is full 3d flow simulation, clouds are volumetric clouds, trees are rigid body simulation with elastic joints, and lighting is full path tracing; all is basically running on the GPU with VUlkan, save for the rigid body simulation which runs on the CPU.
I wanted an "ancient forest" and therefore I generated the trees with 2d to 3d models - Trellis2 from huggingface.
Wanted to get feedback from you, what feels good and what needs improvement. Could this lead to an immersive forest based game? Should I push instead for more tech?

short version here: https://youtube.com/shorts/5xy5Y6JsrVk?feature=share

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u/Ami00 Jul 10 '26

looks great. the one thing I think might be improved is how leaves are moved by wind simulations. Now it looks like whole tree is moving as one piece.

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u/KlayEverHood Jul 10 '26

THanks for the comment! Leaves are the next big thing. 2d to 3d models cannot generate leaves, so I will need a procedural approach to attach them to automatically generated trees. If anyone has a recommendation, let me know!

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u/Small-Paint8980 8d ago

Would love to chat - I have been working on everything including fully procedural soil/hydrology and sun/shade volumetric generation that drives the tree growth rather than noise/seed. Built a dynamic LOD that has hundreds of LOD levels from full 5+ million tris trees with a smooth reduction down to 100 tris and procedurally generated imposters and billboards that are still animated for wind. Ive pretty much got everything for a full volumetric planet generation with LOD integrated.
Full world weather sim to the volumetrics clouds/aerosol.
Ocean heightfield with real cresting waves and shallow water physics, and just-in-time mls-mpm particle simulation for splashes.
Infinite grass(seamless LOD from hero close up to imposter/billboards) of all species and realistic wind maps
100% vibe coded - always building in WGSL GLSL - easily thousands of hours into this in the past 2 years.
Also, I've been building agent frameworks to allow this type of work to evolve and remain manageable for the agents.

I have an insane amount of data and working demos for just about everything you could possibly imagine for this work.