Grass

Why do you use GL_POINTS? Couldn't grass be drawn with just a 1-4 triangles?

Eww, yeah, there's no reason to use points. The best method, IMO, is to use textured quads with alpha testing for most kinds of low-detail plant growth, and basically billboard them - here's a lousy shot of something I wrote a couple years ago -



(Shot with different (sucky) alpha settings with the grass a little bit more ordered (not random))

Heck, even using lines isn't bad, though its a heck of a lot more performance-intensive. Each line counts as a polygon, and covers a lot less area than a quad, so you have to use more of them to get the same effect -



Likewise, you'd have to use a heck of a lot more points (and thus more primitives) to get the same effect with GL_POINTS, which results in a slowdown. So I'd suggest going with the "find a good verticle grass texture and draw a bunch of quads on the screen" approach more than anything else, simply because (by my flawless logic) its the most efficient.

And no, I have no idea where people get those nice-looking textures from :/

EDIT: As a side note, if your grass is static you should not be generating it every pass. This will lead to extreme performance degradation since that's a heck of a lot of computation for large amounts of grass. Instead, you should put all of the grass geometry into a vertex buffer object (VBO) and render that (or even just a display list, if my memory serves me correctly). You should see a considerable performance gain, especially if you were previously rendering in immediate mode before (ie, glBegin(), glEnd() blocks).

Okay, I see what you guys are saying, but I refuse to use the textured quads idea(I don't know why). So scrap the GL_POINTS, use vertex arrays and use triangles? I want to make the blades bend too. Triangles won't do that for me...

Quote:

Original post by AdamGL Okay, I see what you guys are saying, but I refuse to use the textured quads idea(I don't know why). So scrap the GL_POINTS, use vertex arrays and use triangles? I want to make the blades bend too. Triangles won't do that for me...

I'd recommend the use of VBO's over vertex arrays if your grass is not going to be animated. The reason for this is that when you render a vertex array, the vertex data is streamed over to the GPU, which is something that can be avoided if the data doesn't change each pass. A VBO stores the data in GPU memory, meaning no streaming each pass. The drawback is making major changes to VBO geometry (ie, changing the bend in every blade of grass) can make it less effective because you have to send data anyway.

So, if you're going to animate your grass, you might want to use a vertex array. If you are not going to animate it, then you will want to use a VBO.

As for the bending - I remember reading an excellent paper on real-time rendering of windblown prairie grass with seamless LOD-changes, but I can't find it anywhere... I wish I still had a copy.

In any case, you can achieve the bending effect with either single blades of grass or textured quads by using multiple triangles -



Above is a picture showing how a single blade can be composed of multiple primitives, and still achieve a dynamic bend. You can use some maths to determine the curvature of the blade, depending on how "advanced" you wanted to make it. I suck at math, so if I tried something like this, I'd probably end up using some trig identities and just using an angle to represent bend, and not try to figure out curvature.

This can also be extended to be used on entire textured quads for low LOD areas -



Again, by adjusting the coordinates we can make it appear that the set of blades represented by the quad is bending. The problem with this is that it doesn't look good up close, because all the blades move at the same time. For a low LOD, however, you can't tell the difference because a whole bunch of little blades will be swimming around at varying rates and it looks nice.

But yeah. I'm not a real fan of the untextured approach. And at the same time, I've seen some really poorly-done textured ones too. Personally, I think the trick is to find really nice-looking textures, but I both suck at making and finding them, unfortunately [sad]

will rendering 3 triangles per blade be expensive?(i love the idea though)

Much less expensive than rendering points for a blade. As for performance, what can I say? Its three times as expensive as using a single triangle for a blade :P

(and actually, there are 5 triangles in the blade pictured above. 2 for each of the lower quads, 1 for the top one :])