Ground cover in Low-poly Style for Bevy

About the Low-poly style

Low-poly vegetation is the cheapest style to render and to ship.

• Flat shading: one normal per face gives the crisp faceted look; no normal maps.
• Colour lives in vertex colours (glTF COLOR_0), so there are no textures, no UV work and almost no video memory.
• Leaves are solid geometry, not alpha cards: no alpha testing and no transparent overdraw, which matters on mobile GPUs.
• One material can be shared by every model in the scene, so trees batch and instance easily.
• Typical budgets range from a few hundred to a couple of thousand triangles at LOD0.

A good fit for mobile, WebGL/WebGPU, VR, strategy, city builders and stylised indie games. In the engine, use a material that multiplies by vertex colour.

Using it in Bevy

Bevy loads glTF/GLB through the AssetServer: asset_server.load(GltfAssetLabel::Scene(0).from_asset("tree.glb")), spawned with SceneRoot; individual meshes and materials are addressable by label. FBX and OBJ need third-party crates, so GLB is the format to use.

• LOD: give the LOD0–LOD3 entities a VisibilityRange (start and end margins) for distance switching with dithered crossfade — Bevy's HLOD mechanism.
• Leaves: glTF alphaMode MASK becomes AlphaMode::Mask(cutoff) on StandardMaterial, and double-sided materials disable back-face culling.
• Entities that share a mesh and material are batched and instanced automatically, so many tree copies stay cheap.
• Collision: Bevy has no built-in physics; build a collider from the collision mesh with Avian or bevy_rapier.