AI this, AI that - you can't go anywhere without something trying to force AI on you. Usually a company trying to get you to buy into what they've wasted billions on. So indie devs have begun fighting back with their No Gen AI Seal.
Most games (pre-ai at least) would use a brush for this and manually tweak the result if it ended up weird.
E.g. if you were building a desert landscape you might use a rock brush to randomly sprinkle the boulder assets around the area. Then the bush brush to sprinkle some dry bushes.
Very rare for someone to spend the time to individually place something like a rock or a tree, unless it is designed to be used in gameplay or a cutscene (e.g. a climable tree to get into a building through a window).
That’s only for open world maps, many games where the placement of rocks and trees is something that’s subject to miniscule changes for balance reasons.
Honest question: are things like trees, rocks, logs in a huge world like a modern RPG all placed by hand, or does it use AI to fill it out?
Not AI but certainly a semirandom function. Then they go through and manually clean it up by hand.
Most games (pre-ai at least) would use a brush for this and manually tweak the result if it ended up weird.
E.g. if you were building a desert landscape you might use a rock brush to randomly sprinkle the boulder assets around the area. Then the bush brush to sprinkle some dry bushes.
Very rare for someone to spend the time to individually place something like a rock or a tree, unless it is designed to be used in gameplay or a cutscene (e.g. a climable tree to get into a building through a window).
That’s only for open world maps, many games where the placement of rocks and trees is something that’s subject to miniscule changes for balance reasons.