Game Rendering » Grass

Procedural Approach to Animate Interactive Natural Sceneries

admin — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 22:53:16 +0000

This algorithm for rendering grass allows user interaction with the grass which most other methods won’t. They call this interaction effect treading and it’s implemented as a scalar field which determines in which direction the individual grass straws should bend.

Link to the paper, more screenshots and movies
http://www-evasion.inrialpes.fr/Publications/2003/GPRFC03/

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Rendering Countless Blades of Waving Grass

admin — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 22:43:17 +0000

A full article that presents every aspect of implementing billboarded grass fields in games. It uses a vertex shaders for animating the grass in the wind.

Here’s the full article for free (also the source for the image). Or you could buy the great book “GPU Gems 1″ which also contains the article.
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems/gpugems_ch07.html

An implementation of the grass rendering by Nvidia:
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nature_scene.html

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Rendering Grass Terrains in Real-Time with Dynamic Lighting

admin — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:51:10 +0000

A very advanced method to do grass rendering with dynamic lightning. There are shadows cast from each grass straw and you can paint a density map to select where you want grass and how much. The grass is obviously also animated in a very realistic way. The following is how they describe the technique briefly.

“We use a combination of geometry and lit volume slices, composed of Bidirectional Texture Functions (BTFs). BTFs, generated using a fast pre-computation step, provide an accurate, per pixel lighting of the grass.”

Link to more images and the paper:
http://www.kevinboulanger.net/grass.html

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Animated Grass with Vertex Displacement

admin — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:25:56 +0000

This is a very easy way to animate the grass of a scene in a realistic way. You render the grass the usual way with intersecting quads distributed randomly on the terrain you want the grass on. Then in the vertex shader, the top two vertices are displaced with the combination of four sinus waves. This gives a waving grass.

The result might look like this (this really depends on the quality of the textures used for grass).

In the original paper, you can find a source code for the shaders and full description of the technique.
http://ati.amd.com/developer/shaderx/shaderx_animatedgrass.pdf

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