one of the thing i always wanted to add is vegetation, tree, weeds, grass etc...
in a nutshell, to support all kind of vegetation you need to have few things:
1. some app to generate the content, plant model, textures etc.
2. engine supporting geometry instancing.
3. extra (depends of scene size), engine supporting model level of detail (LOD)
4. extra (depends of scene size), engine supporting good outdoor culling.
1. this is very critical, having great app for generating plants is a must, if the model and textures isn't quality enough, the best code won't do much... i checked some apps, and i want to tell you that if you have some $, speedtree is the way to go, checked it, love it...
2. if you are going to render plants, you won't render one tree with 1x1 meter of grass, you probably want to spread it all over a 1x1 km terrain, so you are going to render hundreds of the same plant with different properties or such, so you don't want to kill your gpu with 20000 draw calls... unless real time performance isn't an issue for you.
for me performance is critical so i'v implemented instancing support for each plant type.
3. if your scene is large enough you need to consider LOD support, there is not need to render full plant geometry from certain distance, you probably won't notice if its real geometry or simple billboard, but your gpu will, so consider replacing you full model with low model or even quad when distance to eye pos is large enough.
i added auto lod support in the engine and use it also for plants (maybe i will post on it next time)
4. if your scene is large enough and you have massive amount of plants, so you already know that its a good idea to cull your data.
anther thing, because we are using instancing on the same model again and again, its a better idea to break symmetry when rendering the plants.
you can place them with different rotation and apply random motion for each plant (in shader).
here is a screenshot of a test scene:
vegetation, sun shafts and dynamic atmosphere