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Grass Rendering Series
- rmosolgo 1y agoI 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoDevelopers interested in speciation have a tendency to fall prey to genetic algorithms and simulations, and eventually lost to those ratholes
- zimpenfish 1y 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 1y agoRemedy 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-Skinning 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 1y agoAcerola on YouTube also has a pretty nice (if hectic) series about grass rendering: - https://youtu.be/Y0Ko0kvwfgA?si=RGihxnz8i1RoC1jf https://youtu.be/Y0Ko0kvwfgA?si=RGihxnz8i1RoC1jf - https://youtu.be/jw00MbIJcrk?si=czh3dfdneMEVuJXI https://youtu.be/jw00MbIJcrk?si=czh3dfdneMEVuJXI - https://youtu.be/PNvlqsXdQic?si=Oa_v8ypWvxm3PLhp https://youtu.be/PNvlqsXdQic?si=Oa_v8ypWvxm3PLhp
- jmiskovic 1y agoI 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp7REZBV4P4 [2] https://github.com/jmiskovic/grassland/blob/main/grass.lua https://github.com/jmiskovic/grassland/blob/main/grass.lua
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- Aeolun 1y agoThat was pretty interesting, and was actually something I could follow along with, even if I’d never want to write a shader myself.
- fractallyte 1y agoOnly some spires of bright green grass Transparently in sunshine quivering. -- Emily Brontë, August 1837