Rendering Grass Terrains in Real Time with Indirect Lighting

[dumvat]

well today skyrim is the best known game to use grass thats "somewhat" like this.

[ollobrains1]

put it into a game pioneer space sim ( google it ) may have some use for u on planets

[notthere83]

if you got such good framerates on this even with a geforce 7800 gtx, how come we STILL don't see grass like this games?

[darianknight]

@notthere83 Actually, Kevin Boulanger was hired by EA Sports. From what I know, it's quite possible that the grass system was used in the stadiums for the Football games. I've looked over the whitepaper on how he accomplished this and it seems more than plausible for modern graphics cards to handle this with high framerates, since he made this about 2 years ago.

[alexgrinkov]

i guess no one really cares about truly dynamic shadows on grass in most cases. it can be made precomputed, i.e. be static.

[darianknight]

@alexgrinkov Of course :) But in the end, it's a truly dynamic approach that lends higher levels of realism and believability in a virtual environment. Like saying why bother with procedural textures when we can get away with 512 resolution PNGs? Sure, you could do that, but the cost in the end is realism.

[inemanja]

great!!!

[darianknight]

Sadly, there is no open source code for this approach. It was made by Kevin Boulanger, who I believe was picked up to work for EA. There are, however, plenty of whitepapers on the algorithms and approach - research wise... so I think a programmer could in theory duplicate it.

[KarenRei]

Best grass ever. Pair it with HirniNG's trees and animation approach...

Any clue if the source is available?