The long road to a million trees – Bart Wilmink – GodotCon 2026

Highlights of getting to render 200-800k trees in-frame at acceptable CPU/GPU cost, (without using cards or manual LODs). Having taken the very basic concept behind the Witcher 4's voxel-based rendering for distant items and combined that with Godot's native LOD capabilities. Covers challenges encountered and next steps remaining. The experimental implementation currently runs with stock Godot, no custom build or native GDExtension required. The advantages compared to cards/manual LOD Quantizing to voxels Handling multimesh LOD limitations How work is offloaded to non-render worker-thread Extending protonscatter to connect this custom renderer Fast loading/startup of scene with millions of items (MMI buffer streaming) Retrospective of project thus far Speaker: Bart Wilmink GodotCon Amsterdam 2026: https://conference.godotengine.org/2026/