I've been working on rendering high density grass. I use glsl shaders to create camera facing billboards with grass textures. All grass data is stored in buffers on the graphics card. The grass is divided into tiles with a large number of billboards on every tile.
Features:
Individual coloring of grass billboards
Individual size of grass billboards
Different textures for grass billboards, using texture atlas
Grass moves in wind
Grass is shaded when moving
Grass fades using dissolve
Grass over infinite areas
Grass can be lighted/shadowed using a light map
Interface for grass creation
This screenshot shows the grass on a TerrainPage, the grass and terrain is shadowed by the clouds.
You know, if we coupled grass, water, bloom, etc. all together we could create a really awesome webstart demo to show off what you can do in jME…sounds like a good idea for something to show at GDC.
You know, if we coupled grass, water, bloom, etc. all together we could create a really awesome webstart demo to show off what you can do in jME.....sounds like a good idea for something to show at GDC. ;)
Sounds like an excelent idea to me, might interest alot of people into jME
Thanks for the tips, I've actually read 1,3,4, before creating the grass :) This method I've used is focused on rendering grass for games... The technique is based on chapter 1, "Toward photorealism in virtual botany", from the book "GPU gems 2" http://developer.nvidia.com/object/gpu_gems_2_home.html.
Looks great, can you render in wireframe mode and take a screenshot for a nice side by side comparison? Might give a better impression on how your are building the vegetation shapes (i.e. pattern of quads). How are you currently controlling what texture is pulled from the Atlas? I.e. how do you (or how do you see) controlling groupings (a group of wildflowers in one area, weeds in another, the rest grass)? I can't wait to see when you get further with trees and larger foliage. Exciting stuff, keep it up!
I've been told that there will be a kiosk/computer at the sun booth showing off jME. So far all I know is that they will be showing off Bang! Howdy and perhaps one other game that uses jME.
Looks great, can you render in wireframe mode and take a screenshot for a nice side by side comparison? Might give a better impression on how your are building the vegetation shapes (i.e. pattern of quads). How are you currently controlling what texture is pulled from the Atlas? I.e. how do you (or how do you see) controlling groupings (a group of wildflowers in one area, weeds in another, the rest grass)? I can't wait to see when you get further with trees and larger foliage. Exciting stuff, keep it up!
Here is a wireframe render. The grass is split into a uniform grid, that
Wouldn’t happen to have a version we could run ourselves would you? Source code isn’t important (at this point ;)) if you don’t want to share it, I’d just like to see it run. I do get the feeling it’ll crawl to 0fps on my system though :’(
I think you could really optimize this by increasing the width of the quads the farther out you go, there by decreasing poly count and math related to skinning etc… have to tile the grass tex on the wide quads of course.
I used to have a OpenGL fur demo, basically just using lines is a good idea too.
