Animating and lighting grass in real-time

I present a simple method to render fields of grass, animated in the wind, in real-time. The technique employs vertex shaders to render displacement maps with Russian-doll style transparent shells. Animation is achieved by translating the surface according to a local wind vector while preserving the...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Bakay, Brook M.
Format: Others
Language:English
Published: 2009
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/2429/14034
Description
Summary:I present a simple method to render fields of grass, animated in the wind, in real-time. The technique employs vertex shaders to render displacement maps with Russian-doll style transparent shells. Animation is achieved by translating the surface according to a local wind vector while preserving the length of the blades of grass. Lighting is also done in a vertex shader, with point light sources, accounting for the anisotropic nature of grass, self-shadowing and attenuation. This technique achieves convincing results on current consumer graphics hardware and can be applied to other similar surfaces such as hair and fur. === Science, Faculty of === Computer Science, Department of === Graduate