Rendering Grass Terrains in Real Time with Indirect Lighting

Another video demonstration from the efforts of Kevin Boulanger. From his site:

"Since grass is very abundant on the Earths surface, it is an important element of rendered natural 3D scenes. Real-time realistic rendering of grass has always been difficult due to the huge number of grass blades. Overcoming this geometric complexity usually requires many coarse approximations to provide interactive frame rates. However, the performance comes at the cost of poor lighting quality and lack of detail of the grass. Our research work is about a grass rendering technique that allows better lighting and parallax effect while maintaining real-time performance. We use a combination of geometry and lit volume slices, composed of Bidirectional Texture Functions (BTFs). BTFs, generated using a fast pre-computation step, provide an accurate, per pixel lighting of the grass. Our implementation allows the rendering of a football field, covered by approximately 627 million virtual grass blades, with dynamic lighting, shadows and anti-aliasing in real-time. The creation of arbitrary shaped patches of grass is made possible using our density management. The latter also allows seamless transitions between levels of detail."

For more information, please check out Kevin Boulanger's website at: http://www.kevinboulanger.net/

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Grass
• Lighting
• 3D
• Graphics
• Computer
• Shader
• Terrain
• Kevin
• Boulanger

[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.

[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.

[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

[inemanja]

great!!!

[KarenRei]

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

Any clue if the source is available?