Real-time Rendering of Realistic Grasses Using Fractal and Shader-Instancing
Jinmo Kim, Hyung-Je Cho · Journal of Korea Multimedia Society · 2010
The grass is one of important components that cover the wide surfaces in the application such as game or real time simulation. Actually, it not easy to render effectively numerous grasses that grow over the wide terrain. To solve the difficulty, we must find a solution to the two contradictions in terms : quality and calculation cost. As a solution to the above-mentioned task, in this paper, we propose an efficient method to represent the natural grasses by introducing fractal theory and instancing technique. Although the existing grass representation methods make use of a simple rule of applying a basic grass model repeatedly in rendering process, on the contrary we take advantage of the basic property of fractal's self-similarity and we devise a natural representation method suited to the given environment by introducing two important growth factors such as nature of terrain and quantity of light, and finally we apply a GPU-based shader instancing technique to rendering numerous grass models in real-time.