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Workfiles & insights - Gamedev in TD / Grass!

Added 2022-06-17 10:20:50 +0000 UTC

Dearest supporters! Busy times, currently working on a project with 4x 4k beamers for a museum. I actually modeled the entire room and used this gamedev in touchdesigner technique for testing out the mapping. The fun thing is that you can walk around the room itself! So I must say, for archviz kind of stuff, this .toe is very useful!

Then I'm always intrigued by how games deal with nature stuff, especially grass. It's always balancing between looks and performance. It would just look lame if it's not dense enough, but then again, stuff adds up quite quickly and you'll be running around in slomo. This is my take on how to render grass in a gamedev kind of environment. The real problem I'm encountering that within TD you don't have a tessellation stage within the shader. So you could control the level of detail, or lets say subdivisions of your grass model, based on distance for instance. I'm not sure what Vulkan will bring to TD.

Now I'm sort of forced to work with an actual grass model, so stuff going from the CPU to GPU, that's expensive. I'll try to model it using a geometry shader, that might help. But then again, no option to put a low poly model further up. Just reach out if you might have a suggestion for this.

Regarding collisions, I went back to the 'normal to camera' option to calculate the angle the character is hitting a wall. I dropped the depth camera and used a combination of this measurement points around the character. With the combination I only need a couple points. Without the 'normal to camera' pass, it just got to difficult to have an adaptive 'glide' when you hit a wall. Or I would need so many points, just not worth it. Using a renderpass/renderselect doesn't seem to eat a lot of bandwith.

So for now, have fun with that grass, the collision has to wait a little bit to make it more watertight! Make sure you visit http://www.hdrihaven.com for downloading a descent cubemap for the skye. I now loaded in a default one from the Derivative samples, but it's not the nicest one. HDRIhaven is packed with free hdri's!

Thanks again for making this development possible, your support is gold!