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Author Topic: Tall grass fields  (Read 26278 times)

Köngen

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Tall grass fields
« on: July 25, 2011, 12:23:35 pm »


Image speaks for itself. Tall grass would really add to the environmental variety. I can only imagine great fields of tall grass stretching across the hills. Maybe somehow the humidity could change the hue from green to yellow depending on how dry the air is or simply depending on the climate zone so that you get the characteristic dry yellow grass in the african savannah and greener grass along the coasts. Maybe the height of the grass could be adjusted depending on the wild life. Maybe also the wind could create waves in the grass fields.

I'm  thinking that this could be achieved in couple of ways. Either it could be a spam of flatsprites or rows of wide polygons featuring several straws of grass each.

Has there been any thoughts about this? Will this be a feature?
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Jagerbomber

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Tall grass fields
« Reply #1 on: July 25, 2011, 09:19:45 pm »
TALL GRASS FIELDS?!
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"Perhaps this speaks to some larger trend within society today...  A prevailing desire on the part of indie developers to recreate the entire world into one where you can charge more than $15 for your game design degree coursework." - Yahtzee ;) :P

Köngen

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Tall grass fields
« Reply #2 on: July 25, 2011, 09:48:40 pm »
Oh yez! Pokémon Outerra. I would play it :P
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SpaceFlight

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Tall grass fields
« Reply #3 on: July 26, 2011, 06:00:47 am »
Quote from: Jagerbomber
TALL GRASS FIELDS?!

Prof. Oak got a point!
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cameni

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Tall grass fields
« Reply #4 on: July 26, 2011, 06:22:08 am »
We've been thinking about tall grass, yes there are several possible ways to get it done. Probably it could be treated the same way as trees but with a reduced depth scale - individual bunches of blades up close, billboards further away, relatively quickly overtaken by a simplified polygonal envelope that would also cover soldiers and Pokémon hidden in the grass.

It could be also optimized somewhat better, as the fields are usually fairly continuous.
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Köngen

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Tall grass fields
« Reply #5 on: July 26, 2011, 10:15:27 am »
That sounds sweet I must say. Any thoughts on the wind waves? That might be difficult to do though.
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cameni

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Tall grass fields
« Reply #6 on: July 26, 2011, 12:18:04 pm »
Hmm, animating it should not be problematic up until the envelope. The envelope itself would need some kind of a shader to give the appearance of wind waves, hopefully it will also blend nicely with the animated geometry in front of it.
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NouberNou

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Tall grass fields
« Reply #7 on: August 02, 2011, 08:17:17 pm »
Non-distracting transition from geometry to billboards to a polygon layer would be awesome. I look at how the RealVirtuality engine does it now and it is frustrating. This is one of my biggest pet peeves in Arma!
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Zippy24

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Re: Tall grass fields
« Reply #8 on: September 04, 2011, 01:41:37 am »
Alright time for my first post after lurking on these forums for some time. I just wanted to link you to a thesis on realtime grass rendering. Grass made up of polygon planes with a 2d texture seem to be very hard to make realistic without too much of a performance hit, the method proposed in the thesis seems to make much more sense to me although it may affect performance a bit more. I'm not sure since I have not tried using it.

Anyways here is a link: http://www.kevinboulanger.net/publications/thesisKevinBoulanger.pdf
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cameni

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Re: Tall grass fields
« Reply #9 on: September 04, 2011, 10:16:11 am »
Thanks for the link. Although not everything is applicable, it's a very nice compendium of stuff and math related to the vegetation rendering.
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Seth

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Re: Tall grass fields
« Reply #10 on: September 04, 2011, 03:53:53 pm »
Cameni, what's your take on the Euciledon, they claim to have unlimited detail in their game engine or something, I'm a bit lost and I am yet to see anyone say anything positive about them. Recently the Australian governemnt gave them $2,000,000 which is surprising.

It's all about voxcels, point cloud data and no polygons.

They claim to have improved the graphics by 1000x, a bold statment, can they deliver?
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Tottel

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Re: Tall grass fields
« Reply #11 on: September 04, 2011, 04:39:33 pm »
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