Eli5: In games like World of Warcraft (for example) with vast and varied terrains, did a human game designer decide to put THAT particular rock on THAT particular ridge on THAT particular mountain, or is world design more automated somehow?
In: Technology
In most cases yes, the exception is foliage and trees. *Some* (but not all) games will use vegetation rendering middleware such as SpeedTree. One of the options of those middleware programs is usually to just designate an area as being low grass, high grass, forest, ect… The middleware then fills the area in with the appropriate vegetation. You tend to see this more in games like GTA where there are huge vegetated areas that have little to no content in them, so the specific placement of plants isn’t particularly important.
There is a caveat to this, however, which is that in vegetation rendering middleware there’s usually still an option to go in an customize the procedural generated trees and the trend is for developers to do just that, such that the trees tend to look as though they were individually placed.
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