Grass Rendering Series

https://hexaquo.at/pages/grass-rendering-series-part-1-theory/

by ibobev • 1 year ago

116 9 1 year ago

rmosolgo• 1 year ago

I haven't run through the grass in a video game since Ocarina of Time, so those modern screenshots really impressed me.

Have there been any games that tried to include species diversity in their grass? Around here anyways, there are 6 or 8 major pasture species, often in different growth stages at any given time of year.

grg0• 1 year ago

I think you might catch a butterfly or two in some games, but it's rare. I agree these nature environments often feel totally dead in games. Same with nature sounds. Devs usually get a bigger boner simulating wind and contact physics on each individual blade of grass (like this blog post does in part 3, of course).

setr• 1 year ago

Developers interested in speciation have a tendency to fall prey to genetic algorithms and simulations, and eventually lost to those ratholes

zimpenfish• 1 year ago

Have there been any games that tried to include species diversity in their grass?

Minecraft, if you squint?[0] Obviously that's not any kind of graphical fidelity to real grass though.

[0] There's a couple of variants of grass which is then tinted to reflect the biome you're in. Some of the terrain mods add a bunch of new grasses ("betternether" springs to mind)

dcrazy• 1 year ago

Remedy released this fantastic talk about Alan Wake 2’s foliage system outside the paywall during last year’s GDC: https://gdcvault.com/play/1034310/Large-Scale-GPU-Based-Skin...

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like it can be downloaded anymore, at least without an account.

kibibu• 1 year ago

Acerola on YouTube also has a pretty nice (if hectic) series about grass rendering:

- https://youtu.be/Y0Ko0kvwfgA?si=RGihxnz8i1RoC1jf

- https://youtu.be/jw00MbIJcrk?si=czh3dfdneMEVuJXI

- https://youtu.be/PNvlqsXdQic?si=Oa_v8ypWvxm3PLhp

jmiskovic• 1 year ago

I would rather recommend this video [1] from SimonDev. It is much more enjoyable to watch. But all of these explain the exact same approach of rendering instanced geometry, with wind dynamics made in vertex shader.

I used this as reference to implement an infinite grass world in ~300 LoC of Lua and GLSL.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp7REZBV4P4 [2] https://github.com/jmiskovic/grassland/blob/main/grass.lua

Aeolun• 1 year ago

That was pretty interesting, and was actually something I could follow along with, even if I’d never want to write a shader myself.

fractallyte• 1 year ago

Only some spires of bright green grass

Transparently in sunshine quivering.

-- Emily Brontë, August 1837

Grass Rendering Series

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