Rendering of Realistic
Grass (In Real Time)
Sami Benzaid
Motivation
 When playing video games, the more
realistic the scenery is, the more
immersive the experience.
 Grass is typically very unrealistic. Close
inspection of it in-game usually reveals
that it either consists of static textures, or if
it is made up of polygons, the grass is very
sparse.
Game: Far Cry
Website: http://www.falcon-nw.com/keltstake/hxd.asp
Website: http://www.kevinboulanger.net/grass.html
Eventual Goals
 Understand a multitude different methods
used to perform real-time rendering of
grass, after surveying many papers on the
subject.
 Ideally, implement a piece of software that
allows the user to move the camera
around a virtual terrain full of realisticlooking (although not perfect) grass, in
real-time.
Prior Work
 E. Galin, P. Poulin. Real-time Rendering of
Realistic-looking Grass.
 BTFs (Bidirectional Texture Functions).
 R. Cook et al. Stochastic Simplification of
Aggregate Detail. (Pixar).
 Displaying a random subset of visual
elements.
 Many others that I will be looking into.
Initial Idea
 Try to combine polygons and textures, and make
it look relatively realistic.
 The grass closest to the camera is rendered
using polygons. As it gets further away from the
camera, less of it is rendered (perhaps a subset
selected by the stochastic method described in
the Pixar paper).
 At a certain point, polygons are no longer used,
but rather a pre-made set of static, flat, synthetic
textures created from the grass geometry is
used.
 I plan to find pre-existing grass geometry to
draw and create textures from.
More Details to Work Out
 At this time, I still have some details to
work out with regards to this project.
 Aspects of the project are subject to minor
changes.
Milestones
 March 15: Finish doing preliminary research on
grass rendering (reading papers, planning
software implementation). Also, have already
found grass geometry and generated some
static textures.
 April 07: Already be well into the development of
my grass rendering implementation.
 April 30: Be roughly finished with the
implementation at this point, probably just trying
to fix bugs.