[HN Gopher] Grass Rendering Series
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       Grass Rendering Series
        
       Author : ibobev
       Score  : 109 points
       Date   : 2025-05-26 12:29 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (hexaquo.at)
 (TXT) w3m dump (hexaquo.at)
        
       | rmosolgo wrote:
       | I haven't run through the grass in a video game since Ocarina of
       | Time, so those modern screenshots really impressed me.
       | 
       | Have there been any games that tried to include species diversity
       | in their grass? Around here anyways, there are 6 or 8 major
       | pasture species, often in different growth stages at any given
       | time of year.
        
         | grg0 wrote:
         | I think you might catch a butterfly or two in some games, but
         | it's rare. I agree these nature environments often feel totally
         | dead in games. Same with nature sounds. Devs usually get a
         | bigger boner simulating wind and contact physics on each
         | individual blade of grass (like this blog post does in part 3,
         | of course).
        
           | setr wrote:
           | Developers interested in speciation have a tendency to fall
           | prey to genetic algorithms and simulations, and eventually
           | lost to those ratholes
        
         | zimpenfish wrote:
         | > Have there been any games that tried to include species
         | diversity in their grass?
         | 
         | Minecraft, if you squint?[0] Obviously that's not any kind of
         | graphical fidelity to real grass though.
         | 
         | [0] There's a couple of variants of grass which is then tinted
         | to reflect the biome you're in. Some of the terrain mods add a
         | bunch of new grasses ("betternether" springs to mind)
        
       | dcrazy wrote:
       | Remedy released this fantastic talk about Alan Wake 2's foliage
       | system outside the paywall during last year's GDC:
       | https://gdcvault.com/play/1034310/Large-Scale-GPU-Based-Skin...
       | 
       | Unfortunately it doesn't seem like it can be downloaded anymore,
       | at least without an account.
        
       | kibibu wrote:
       | Acerola on YouTube also has a pretty nice (if hectic) series
       | about grass rendering:
       | 
       | - https://youtu.be/Y0Ko0kvwfgA?si=RGihxnz8i1RoC1jf
       | 
       | - https://youtu.be/jw00MbIJcrk?si=czh3dfdneMEVuJXI
       | 
       | - https://youtu.be/PNvlqsXdQic?si=Oa_v8ypWvxm3PLhp
        
         | jmiskovic wrote:
         | I would rather recommend this video [1] from SimonDev. It is
         | much more enjoyable to watch. But all of these explain the
         | exact same approach of rendering instanced geometry, with wind
         | dynamics made in vertex shader.
         | 
         | I used this as reference to implement an infinite grass world
         | in ~300 LoC of Lua and GLSL.
         | 
         | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp7REZBV4P4 [2]
         | https://github.com/jmiskovic/grassland/blob/main/grass.lua
        
       | Aeolun wrote:
       | That was pretty interesting, and was actually something I could
       | follow along with, even if I'd never want to write a shader
       | myself.
        
       | fractallyte wrote:
       | Only some spires of bright green grass
       | 
       | Transparently in sunshine quivering.
       | 
       | -- Emily Bronte, August 1837
        
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       (page generated 2025-05-29 23:02 UTC)