Vegetation

This article expands on the previous parts of the grass rendering series and makes it feasible for real-world use with a level-of-detail system utilizing impostors. If you want to implement a grass effect from scratch yourself, definitely go through the previous parts first, starting at Grass Rendering Series Part 1: Theory. However, this tutorial will also be useful if you just want to learn about level-of-detail systems in general, as I’ll provide some theory and show my general approach towards hand-crafting impostors with custom shaders....

In the previous part, Grass Rendering Series Part 2: Full-Geometry Grass in Godot, we worked on placing and shading blades of grass to get a realistic-looking field of grass into our scene. It looks nice, but it’s completely static: it looks good on screenshots, but in a game, you’d want your grass to look lively and react to what’s happening around it. Therefore, in this third part, we’ll add three ways of animating and interacting with the grass: wind, displacement, and cutting....

In this second part of the Grass Rendering series, we’ll go over one possible implementation of grass in Godot. It will be full-geometry grass, meaning that each grass blade is an actual 3D object. This is in contrast to the also very popular billboard grass, where multiple blades of grass (or other plants) are drawn onto a transparent texture, which is rendered onto quads scattered across the ground. If you haven’t read part 1, I’d recommend to check that our first: Grass Rendering Series Part 1: Theory...

This is part 1 of a multi-part series on grass rendering. We’ll start by figuring out how realistic grass should look like, and how herbage can be modeled with the tools we have at our disposal in real-time 3D graphics. Then, we’ll look at how to implement different methods of grass rendering in Godot. However, most of the tutorial will not be Godot-specific aside from some node names and syntax....