better grass

Post your questions, suggestions and experiences regarding to Image manipulation, 3d modeling and level editing for the Irrlicht engine here.
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Virion
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better grass

Post by Virion »

this is my current grass model
Image
but i'm not quite satisfied with it. anyone know any better grass example that i can refer to? (preferable wireframe) thanks in advance
BlindSide
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Post by BlindSide »

I think it looks great except for the X shaped part pointing towards the camera. Maybe you can animate it too?
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Virion
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Post by Virion »

BlindSide wrote:I think it looks great except for the X shaped part pointing towards the camera.
hmm... the problem is all the sides have this X shapes :?
BlindSide wrote:Maybe you can animate it too?
yea i will. otherwise the level will be too static and boring
andrei25ni
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Post by andrei25ni »

is your grass going to be tiled?

I'm studying the grass in Battlefield 2, and trying to add something similar to my game.
They apparently used fixed billboards, positioned at random rotations, and they match the color of the texture of the terrain. And in return, the texture of the terrain also mimics the grass billboards, like it's flatten.

Here are some Battlefield examples:

http://evilworksgames.deathtouchstudios ... een030.jpg
http://evilworksgames.deathtouchstudios ... een031.jpg
http://evilworksgames.deathtouchstudios ... een078.jpg

And here are some of my attempts:

http://evilworksgames.deathtouchstudios ... pic_42.jpg
http://evilworksgames.deathtouchstudios ... pic_43.jpg
http://evilworksgames.deathtouchstudios ... pic_44.jpg
DavidJE13
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Post by DavidJE13 »

andrei25ni; that looks good (battlefield and yours). I suppose the key here is making the ground texture match the tuft texture quite closely. How are you positioning & rendering the nodes?
I would suggest an improvement to the method; add a simple shader to make the tufts fade to invisible as the angle they make with the camera gets smaller. That way the odd-looking side-on quads won't be visible. Not sure how much this would effect performance. Also making the quads smaller (vertically) towards the edges of the grassy area would make them look more realistic IMO.

btw, you'd be much better off using ALPHA_CHANNEL_REF instead of ALPHA_CHANNEL; it'll remove the odd glowing around tree leaves and significantly increase FPS with that many grass nodes.
Dorth
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Post by Dorth »

I often see grass patch attempt as a quad put vertical on the ground, 2 corners up. However, the best patch I saw was a triangle/quads with one corner up.
arras
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Post by arras »

Virion >> I would say problem is in density of your grass pattern. If you would draw individual blades at bigger distance from each other, they would not blend together under small angles to camera making faces of your model so noticeable.

Bye the way the same problem often occur with modelling trees and its hard to overcome if you want to keep your polycount reasonable.
Eigen
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Post by Eigen »

I'm using grass blades that are modeled like this. 3 triangles total.
Virion
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Post by Virion »

thanks for all the tips. i've made it slightly better now. no more X shape.

Image
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