Interactive Grass Rendering Using Real-Time Tessellation

Klemens JahrmannVienna University of

Technologyklemens.jahrmann@net1220.at

Michael WimmerVienna University of

Technologywimmer@cg.tuwien.ac.at

ABSTRACTGrass rendering is needed for many outdoor scenes, but for real-time applications, rendering each blade of grass asgeometry has been too expensive so far. This is why grass is most often drawn as a texture mapped onto the groundor grass patches rendered as transparent billboard quads. Recent approaches use geometry for blades that are nearthe camera and flat geometry for rendering further away. In this paper, we present a technique which is capableof rendering whole grass fields in real time as geometry by exploiting the capabilities of the tessellation shader.Each single blade of grass is rendered as a two-dimensional tessellated quad facing its own random direction. Thisenables each blade of grass to be influenced by wind and to interact with its environment. In order to adapt thegrass field to the current scene, special textures are developed which encode on the one hand the density and heightof the grass and on the other hand its look and composition.

KeywordsRendering, Grass, Blades, Tessellation, Geometry, Wind, Real-time, LoD

1 INTRODUCTION

Grass rendering plays an important role for renderingoutdoor scenes. Especially in virtual reality and com-puter games, natural scenes should include properlyrendered vegetation. For trees and plants, many solu-tions already exist, but rendering grass has been a prob-lem for a long time due to the high amount of neededgeometry. This is why most often grass is rendered asa texture mapped to the ground or as transparent bill-board quads. Both approaches have different unwantedartifacts: grass as a texture does not look good if it isshown from a small angle since there are no displace-ments of the ground, while billboards have problemswhen they are viewed from above because then theylook very flat.

In this paper, we present a technique which is capableof rendering whole grass fields in real time completelyas geometry. This can be achieved by using the tes-sellation shader as a fast geometry enhancement tooland some level-of-detail approaches, see Figure 1. Thetechnique also uses special textures like density and ter-rain maps to pass important information to the tessella-tion stage.

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Figure 1: Screenshot from our system.

2 STATE OF THE ART

Early grass rendering methods use only flat texturesmapped onto the ground. A more sophisticated texture-based method was proposed by Shah et al. [6]. It usesa bidirectional texture function to animate the grasstexture and displacement mapping for silhouettes,which produces a better look than a simple texture,but needs more time to render. Until today, almostevery method still uses a texture-based technique forrendering grass that is far away from the camera. Forgrass that is closer to the viewer, different approacheshave been developed: Orthmann et al. [5] present agrass-rendering technique which uses two billboardsto represent a bunch of grass and which can interactwith its environment. Rendering billboards can bedone very efficiently on the graphics card but looks flatwhen viewed from higher angles. Also, billboards lackvisual depth. To get deeper looking grass, Habel et al.[3] use half-transparent texture slices, which are placed

on a regular grid, but the visual artifacts for higherangles still exist. In order to solve this problem, Neyret[4] refers to existing fur rendering techniques using3D textures and extends them to render high-detailgeometry for large scenes like grass. This methodallows him to render grass with good quality fromdifferent angles but still looks artificial. Zhao et al.[8] use the geometry shader to draw bunches of grassas geometry, but due to performance reasons, thegenerated grass field is very sparse.

Like in this paper, Wang et al. [7] render a wholegrass field using geometry by drawing a single bladeof grass multiple times. The blade is modeled withseveral vertices and a skeleton for the animation, butcomplex level-of-detail and culling aproaches have tobe implemented to achieve reasonable framerates forrather sparse grass fields. Boulanger et al. [1] present ahybrid technique which uses the techniques mentionedbefore as different levels of detail. As geometric rep-resentation, they use a single grass patch consisting ofblades of grass which are formed by the trajectories ofparticles during a preprocessing step. To get a largegrass field, instanced rendering is used with a randomorientation of the patch for each instance to reduce thegrid artifacts which come with instancing. Grass that isfurther away is rendered using a 3D texture-based tech-nique to draw a set of vertical and horizontal textureslices. For rendering high distances, only one horizon-tal slice is rendered, which leads to a texture mappedonto the ground.

3 OVERVIEWIn contrast to the methods mentioned before, the pro-posed technique renders all blades of a dense grass fieldcompletely as smoothly shaped geometry using hard-ware tessellation. In addition, each blade of grass canbe individually deformed by forces like wind or objects.

First, we explain a basic technique suitable for smallergrass fields. The particular point of this technique isthat it stores the geometric data of each blade of grassindividually. This leads to a perfectly random and uni-form grass field and has good performance, becausemany level-of-detail approaches can be applied to it.However, since each blade is stored by the applicationit does not scale very good for large scenes.

We then extend the basic technique using instancing:only a single grass patch is stored in memory and drawnmultiple times, so that animated grass scenes of practi-cally arbitrary sizes can be rendered in real time. Acommon handicap of instancing are the repeating pat-terns that normally appear, but since each blade is gen-erated inside the shader, its look can be easily influ-enced by the world-space position, which conceals thetransitions between the patches. In addition, by using

instancing, we can simply add billboard flowers to thescene for visual enhancement.

Both methods require an initialization step to set upthe textures (Section 4). We discuss the basic render-ing technique in Section 5, and extensions to handlelarger scenes, including instancing, levels of detail andantialiasing in Section 6.

4 INITIALIZATIONOur technique is based on a grass field which forms theboundaries of the space where grass is rendered. Thefield itself acts as a container for user-specified data liketextures and parameters and is represented as a regulargrid, where each grid cell contains a grass patch. Thesize of each grid cell has a significant impact on theperformance, but the optimal size cannot be predefinedin general, since it depends heavily on the overall sceneand application. Each grass patch saves a vertex arrayobject, which contains all necessary data to draw theblades of grass that grow on it. In addition, a boundingbox is assigned to the patch to perform view-frustumculling.

The visual representation of the rendered grass field canbe adjusted to match a high variety of possible scenes.It is determined by various textures, explained in Sec-tion 4.1, and by several parameters, which are listed be-low. During the initialization step, both the textures andparameters are evaluated to generate the input for therendering process.

• Density: indicates how many blades of grass are ini-tialized on a 1x1 unit-sized square.

• Width: the minimum and maximum width of ablade.

• Height: the minimum and maximum height of ablade.

• Bending factor: determines the maximum bendingoffset.

• Smoothness factor: specifies the maximum tessella-tion of a blade.

4.1 Special Textures4.1.1 Density MapThe density map defines the density and the height overa grass field. Its red channel encodes the density value,which is directly used by the application to determinehow many blades are generated. The green channelgives a subsampled version of the grass, which is laterused when a less detailed model is needed. For exam-ple, when rendering water reflections, only the geome-try near the coast lines need to be rendered. The blue

Figure 2: a) Shows an example of a density map, b) il-lustrates how a terrain map can be used (the white pix-els are transparent) and c) shows a vegetation map of anoasis scene.

channel encodes the blades of grass’ height at each po-sition. If no special height differences are desired, theblue component can be created by blurring the red chan-nel, which leads to a smoother transition between theregions where grass is rendered and where it is not. Anexample of a density map can be seen in Figure 2a.

4.1.2 Terrain MapThe terrain map itself does not change the appearanceof a grass blade, but it determines the texture under-neath the grass, which is also very important, sincegrass is naturally not perfectly dense and it is seen es-pecially at sparse spots or tracks. Basically, the groundbeneath the grass is organized in tiles just like the grass.Each tile has its own seamless diffuse texture assignedand the terrain map works as diffuse texture for thewhole field. How a ground fragment is shaded is thendetermined by the alpha value of the terrain map. Thiscan be seen in Equation 1, where cr is the result color,ctt the sampled tile texture, ctm the sampled terrain mapand a its alpha value. An example of a terrain map canbe seen in Figure 2b.

cr = ctt · (1−a)+ ctm ·a (1)

4.1.3 Vegetation MapA vegetation map is used if the grass color depends onits position inside a scene. If it is enabled, the color ofthe grass is determined by the color sampled from thevegetation map rather than from its diffuse texture. Thiscan be used to simulate a desert scene with an oasis,where lush and healthy grass is placed near the waterand dry grass further away. An example of a vegetationmap can be seen in Figure 2c.

4.2 Creating GeometryAt the end of the initialization step, when all user-specified data has been read, the basic grass geometrythat will serve as input to the rendering pipeline is gen-erated for the high- and the low-detailed version of thegrass field. For this, the density map is sampled and foreach pixel, the world-space area which it refers to is cal-culated. The area is then multiplied with the red sample

and the density value to determine how many bladeshave to be generated at this specific area. Then for eachblade a random position is calculated and added to thehigh-detail list. If the density map’s green sample valueis also greater than zero, it is added to the low-detail listtoo. For each blade, an outline quad is generated withthe following vertices:

w = wmin +R · (wmax−wmin)

h = (hmin +R · (hmax−hmin)) ·densityb

p1 = pc− [0.5 ·w,0.0,0.0] (2)p2 = pc +[0.5 ·w,0.0,0.0]p3 = pc +[0.5 ·w,h,0.0]p4 = pc− [0.5 ·w,h,0.0]

where w is the width and h the height of the blade withtheir maxima and minima wmax, wmin, hmax and hmin,R is a randomly generated number between zero andone, densityb is the blue component sampled from thedensity map, pc is the blade’s center point and pi is theith point of the quad. For higher performance, the heightmap can also be baked into the position, to reduce thetexture lookups during the rendering process.

Apart from the vertex position, each vertex sendsadditional information to the graphics card: two-dimensional texture coordinates and the blade’s centerposition, with a y-value of zero if it is a lower vertex orone if it is an upper vertex. Up to now, each blade ofgrass differs only in its height and its position. To makeeach blade unique, random values have to be generatedand added to the graphics pipeline. For this, each ofthe transfered vectors is filled with random values untilthey are all four-dimensional, and an additional vectorcontaining only random values is passed too. In total,there is one random value for the position and centerposition vector, two values for the texture coordinatesand four additional ones, resulting in eight randomvalues, which will all be needed in the renderingprocess.

5 REAL-TIME GENERATIONThe rendering of the grass is done completely by thegraphics card, which has to be able to execute tessel-lation shaders. If a grass patch is visible inside theview frustum, all included blades of the desired detailare drawn. Since each blade of grass is just a two-dimensional quad, backface-culling has to be disabledfor full visual appearance.

5.1 Grass-Blade GenerationAt first, each blade of grass is represented just by arandom sized quad aligned on the x-y-plane, whichis then tessellated into subquads using the tessellation

Figure 3: Illustration of the creation of a single blade ofgrass. The first step shows the input quad, the followingsteps show the results after the vertex shader, the tessel-lation control shader, the tessellation evaluation shaderand finally the shaded blade of grass after the fragmentshader.

shader. The resulting vertices are aligned on two par-allel splines, which are formed by the upper and lowervertices of the input quad and two additional controlpoints that determine the curvature of a blade. The fi-nal shape of the blade is determined by an alpha tex-ture. The following will describe the path of the quadthrough each shader stage to become a nicely formedand shaded blade of grass. The procedure is also illus-trated in Figure 3.

During the vertex shader stage, the blade’s orientation isspecified by applying a rotation around the blade’s cen-ter position with one of the random values as angle. Forthe upper vertices, which are identified by their centerposition’s y-value, an offset in x-z-direction is appliedby using two other random numbers R1,R2 multipliedby the maximal bending factor b specified for the cur-rent grass patch. The calculation of the offset can beseen in Equation 3.

offset =

b · (2R1−1)0

b · (2R2−1)

(3)

In the tessellation control shader, the distance betweenthe blade and the camera position is computed. Usingthis distance together with a specified maximum dis-tance, the tessellation factor is calculated by linearly in-terpolating the integer values between 0 and the givensmoothness parameter s, which indicates the maximumtessellation of the blade. The interpolation can be seenin Equation 4, where d describes the distance to thecamera and dmax the maximum distance.

level =⌈

s ·(

1− ddmax

)⌉(4)

This value is applied as inner tessellation level and alsoas outer tessellation level for the right and left side ofthe quad. At and above the maximum distance, thetessellation level of zero culls a blade completely, andnear the camera, the tessellation level of s subdividesthe quad to s quads along the y-axis. An alternativeapproach for determining the tessellation level is to cal-culate the screen-space size of a blade and setting the

level so that every subquad occupies the same amountof pixels. This is shown in Equation 5, where uy andly indicate the y-coordinate of the upper and lower ver-tices of the quad, hs is the vertical screen resolution ands is the smoothness parameter.

level = min(((uy ·0.5+0.5)− (ly ·0.5+0.5)) ·hs

# pixels per quad,s)

(5)

Two additional control points are generated in the tes-sellation control shader to determine the shape of theblade in the next step. For this, the lower points’ x-and z-coordinate together with the upper y-coordinatecan simply be taken, but in order to generate slightlydifferently shaped blades of grass, the coordinates arealso varied by two random numbers. The variationcan be seen in Equation 6, where l = (lx, ly, lz) andu = (ux,uy,uz) describe the lower and upper vertex andRi are random values. In our application, R1 lies be-tween − 1

4 and 14 and R2 between 3

4 and 54 .

h =

lx ·R1 +ux · (1−R1)ly ·R2 +uy · (1−R2)lz ·R1 +uz · (1−R1)

(6)

In the tessellation evaluation shader, the tessellatedquad is shaped by aligning the vertices along twoparallel quadratic splines. Each spline is defined bythree control points. We use De Casteljau’s algortithm[2] to compute each desired curve points c(v), with vbeing the domain coordinate (equals i/level for the ith

subquad) as parameter. The evaluation of one vertexon one spline can be seen in Equation 7 and is alsoillustrated in Figure 4a, where pb and pt indicate thebottom and top vertices and h is the additional controlpoint. By using this recursive approach, the tangent~tof a spline can also be found easily.

a = pb + v · (h−pb)

b = h+ v · (pt −h) (7)c(v) = a+ v · (b−a)

~t =b−a‖b−a‖

When both splines are computed, the final position andtangent can be interpolated using the domain coordi-nate v as parameter. The bitangent results directly fromthe two spline points. After tangent and bitangent arecalculated, the normal can be computed by the crossproduct. This can be seen in Equation 8 and is also il-lustrated in Figure 4b.

pb

a

c(v)

pt b h

v

1-v

v1-v

trtl

bitangent

cl(v) cr(v)

a) b)

tangent

u 1-u

Figure 4: a) Illustration of De Casteljau’s algorithm forcalculating a point on a curve with the parameter v. b)shows how the tangent and bitangent of the blade ofgrass can be calculated.

Figure 5: Shows an example of an alpha texture (top)and a diffuse texture (bottom).

position = cl(v) · (1−u)+ cr(v) ·u

bitangent =cr(v)− cl(v)‖cr(v)− cl(v)a‖

(8)

tangent =~tl · (1−u)+~tr ·u∥∥~tl · (1−u)+~tr ·u

∥∥normal =

tangent×bitangent‖tangent×bitangent‖

In the fragment shader, the final shape of the blade isformed by the masking using the alpha texture. Thediffuse color is then sampled either by the blade’s dif-fuse texture or by the vegetation texture as has been ex-plained in Section 4.1.3. In order to achieve a bettervariance, the components of the sampled color are mod-ified slightly by three random values. Due to shadoweffects, a blade of grass is normally darker near theground and lighter at its tip, which can be simulatedby multiplying the color with the vertical texture co-ordinate, leading to a better looking parallax effect. Anexample of an alpha and diffuse texture is shown in Fig-ure 5.

5.2 Applying ForcesUntil now, the grass is rendered nicely, but it is not an-imated and does not interact with its environment. Innature, grass is always in motion, either influenced bywind or by objects which also leave tracks. Wind can

Figure 6: The left image shows an image of foot prints,the middle illustrates its corresponding force map andthe right shows the rendered grass scene with the forcemap applied.

either be applied through a texture which is computed insome application-specific way, e.g. by a physical simu-lation, or it can be calculated using a wind function in-side the shader. We implemented a wind function w(p)that takes the world space position p = (px,py,pz) andthe current time t as parameter and calculates wind astwo overlapping sine and cosine waves along the x-axisand a cosine wave along the z-axis. The function canbe seen in Equation 9, where the constants ci determinethe shape of the wind waves together with a small num-ber ε to avoid a division by zero. The result of the windfunction can then be applied directly to the offset of thequad’s upper vertices in the vertex shader.

w(p) = sin(c1 ·a(p)) · cos(c3 ·a(p)) (9)

a(p) = π ·px + t +π

4|cos(c2 ·π ·pz)|+ ε

In addition to wind, each blade of grass can be influ-enced individually by external forces. For this, we usea force map which indicates the direction in which ablade is pushed at a certain position. In case of simu-lating tracks, the vectors of areas which have been fullyunder pressure by an object point towards the negativey-direction. At the boundary of an object, the force vec-tors point away from the object’s center point, whichcan be approximated by the normal vector at the bound-ary. The vectors of the regions around an object alsopoint away from its center, but with decreasing length.The size of the surrounding region depends on the im-pact of the applied force. An example can be seen inFigure 6. The sampled force-map vector can then beadded to the offset of the quad’s upper vertices.

6 HANDLING LARGE SCENES6.1 VisibilityWhen dealing with large scenes, not all grass patchesare visible in each frame. So the application has to de-termine which patches can be seen by a camera frustum,so that only visible blades of grass are transmitted to thegraphics card. For this we implemented a simple hierar-chical rasterization approach, where every two patches

Figure 7: Illustration of the visibility test for the hierar-chical rasterization approach.

are combined to one bigger patch until the grass field isrepresented by only one macro-patch. Then each framethe macro-patch is tested for visibility with the viewfrustum and if it is visible, its subpatches are tested it-eratively. Figure 7 shows the visibility test for the hier-archical rasterization approach. The boxes representingthe big patches are tested against the blue frustum andthe green quads indicate the visible grass patches.

6.2 InstancingAs mentioned in Section 3, storing each single bladeof grass in memory has hard limits regarding the max-imum scale of a scene. Therefore, we implementedan instanced rendering technique, which only needs tostore a single patch of grass as geometry data, in or-der to minimize the memory overhead of the scale of ascene.

When drawing grass patches by instancing, the basicgrass-rendering method stays the same, but some adap-tations have to be done. The grass field still needs tohave a maximum size in order to generate lookup coor-dinates for the various global textures, but a tiling fac-tor can be applied so that the textures do not need toscale with the scene if they are seamless. Instead of alist of patches, the grass field has to create just a singlepatch. The appropriate transformation matrices for thevisible patch positions are calculated during the raster-ization of visible patches. Then before each draw call,the transformation matrices have to be transmitted tothe graphics card.

In the rendering process, only the vertex shader stagehas to be changed. The vertex position has to be trans-formed by the given transformation matrix, and the den-sity value has to be tested if the blade is visible. In ad-dition, the height map has to be sampled, since it can-not be baked into the position anymore. These changeslead to an additional transformation and two additional

texture lookups for each vertex of each blade, which isa certain overhead over the basic technique for smallerscenes.

Normally, when using instancing on patches, a repeat-ing grid pattern appears over the scene, which is verydisturbing. This effect can be partly hidden by ro-tating or mirroring the instances, like it is done byBoulanger et al. [1]. Since in our method, the bladesare generated inside the shaders, the world-space po-sition can be taken directly as variation factor of eachrandom value R so that no grid pattern is visible with-out any rotation or mirroring. The influence of theworld-space position on a random value can be de-scribed by one of the following Equations 10-12, where11 as well as 12 can also be calculated using the z-coordinate or in 12, the cosine function can be usedtoo. In these equations, p = (px,py,pz) is the world-space position, ~dimension = (dimensionx,dimensiony)refers to the size of the grass field, c stands for any con-stant value and the function fract() gives the fractionalpart of a number.

Rnew = fract(

R ·px

pz

)(10)

Rnew = R · px

dimensionx(11)

Rnew = R · sin(c ·px) (12)

6.3 Level-of-DetailDrawing each single blade of grass each frame hassome disadvantages: First of all, it leads to a low fram-erate, and secondly, aliasing artifacts become visiblethe more blades of grass are drawn onto the same pixel.So several level-of-detail approaches have to be imple-mented to overcome these problems. As mentioned inSection 4, a highly downsampled version of a grasspatch is generated for additional effects like reflections.Following this approach, more versions can be calcu-lated at startup, each with fewer blades of grass. Then,for rendering, the distance to the grass patch determinesthe detail which is drawn.

This will then lead to step artifacts when the distancefalls beyond a detail threshold. To achieve smooth tran-sitions, more random blades of grass have to be culledthe higher the distance gets. This takes place in thetessellation control shader, where the tessellation levelis set to zero for some blades depending on one ofits random values and the ratio between distance andmaximum distance. Since the blades are normally dis-tributed, hardly any artifacts are visible. In addition,the tessellation level of a blade of grass gets smallerthe further away it is, because at far distances, there isno difference if the geometry of a blade is just a singlequad.

In order to reduce the maximum amount of blades thatare drawn, each blade that lies beyond a given maxi-mal distance is culled by the tessellation control shader.This will result in a hard-edged circle of grass aroundthe camera position. A smoother transition can beachieved by lowering the height of a blade of grass thefurther it is away. For these distance-driven approachesdifferent distance functions were tested during the re-search process, and surprisingly a linear function yieldsthe best results regarding performance and appearance.

6.4 AntialiasingAlthough fewer blades of grass are drawn at higher dis-tances, there are still aliasing and z-fighting artifactsvisible. The reason is that it is impossible to render theperfect amount of blades for all distances and viewingdirections. Nevertheless, the artifacts can be hidden byblurring the result image in consideration of the pixel’sdepth value. To maintain real-time performance, we usea separable 7x7 blur kernel with half-pixel samplingfor a screen resolution of 1200x800. Since OpenGL’sdepth values go from one at the near clipping planeto zero at the far clipping plane, the depth value canbe taken directly as center weight for the kernel func-tion. The other kernel weights can either be the samesmall value, which leads to a simple average filter forhigher distances, or small gradient values, leading to aGaussian-like filter. The blur will then be processed intwo separate passes, the first in horizontal and the sec-ond in vertical direction. For each pass, five samplesare taken, the first at the pixel’s center and the other atthe border between the neighboring pixel and its neigh-bor, so that for a 7x7 kernel, only ten texture lookupsare needed.

Blurring the image can reduce the aliasing artifactsonly to a certain amount, but at farther distances, high-frequency noise can still be seen. So we developed an-other approach, which applies a penalty to the mate-rial of a blade of grass depending on its distance to thecamera. This leads to a smooth darkening towards thehorizon, which not only reduces the aliasing a lot, butalso delivers a good sense of depth of a scene. Togetherwith the distance blur, the artifacts can be reduced toa pleasing amount. To illustracte the impact of theseeffects, Figure 8 shows different result images.

7 RESULTSFor the performance evaluation, three scenes have beentested: First, a small oasis scene with reflections andvery dense grass around the lake as well as dry andsparse grass further away. The second scene shows ameadow with complex objects and with a force map ofhuge foot steps applied. The last tested scene shows alarge undulating grass field with flowers and the forcemap of the second scene using instanced rendering.

Figure 8: These result images show the effects of thedistance blur and the depth darkening. Image a) is ren-dered with both effects disabled, b) is blurred withoutdepth darkening, c) has depth darkening enabled but isnot blurred and d) is rendered with both effects applied.

The application was tested on a Windows 7 64-bit sys-tem, with an 8-core Intel i7 processor at 3.8GHz with16GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 with4GB of graphics memory.

In Table 1, the average frames-per-second together withthe corresponding amount of blades drawn are mea-sured for the three different scenes. It is tested with andwithout post-processing effects (the distance blur andthe depth darkening) and with differently scaled grassfields. Some tests also contain additional geometry be-sides the grass field, which is stated in the column Add.drawn.

Scene FPS Vis. Blades Scale PP effects Add. drawnOasis 75 136,650 160x160 enabled -Oasis 78 136,650 160x160 disabled -Oasis 65 330,816 320x320 enabled -Oasis 68 330,816 320x320 disabled -

Meadow 84 348,370 300x300 enabled -Meadow 88 348,370 300x300 disabled -Meadow 83 348,370 300x300 enabled ObjectsMeadow 87 348,370 300x300 disabled ObjectsMeadow 81 340,716 600x600 enabled ObjectsMeadow 85 340,716 600x600 disabled ObjectsInstance 60 660,000 300x300 enabled -Instance 62 660,000 300x300 disabled -Instance 56 824,000 600x600 enabled -Instance 58 824,000 600x600 disabled -Instance 55 1,008,000 2,000x2,000 enabled FlowersInstance 57 1,008,000 2,000x2,000 disabled FlowersInstance 55 1,008,000 4,000x4,000 enabled FlowersInstance 57 1,008,000 4,000x4,000 enabled FlowersInstance 55 1,008,000 8,000x8,000 enabled FlowersInstance 57 1,008,000 8,000x8,000 enabled FlowersInstance 55 1,008,000 90,000x90,000 enabled FlowersInstance 57 1,008,000 90,000x90,000 enabled Flowers

Table 1: Test results of three different scenes. SceneOasis containing water reflections and a vegetation mapand scene Meadow containing highly detailed objectsare rendered both with the basic technique. Scene In-stance is rendered using the instanced rendering ap-proach together with billboard flowers.

For the results we tried to position the camera forworst-case scenarios where most blades of grass aredrawn. The corresponding images can be seen in the

Figure 9: The rendered image of the Oasis scene.

Figure 10: The rendered image of the Meadow scene.

Figures 9, 10 and 11. As stated in earlier sections, forsmaller scenes the highly optimized version is superiorto the instanced version, but the big advantage of theinstanced version is that its performance stays constantwith the amount of blades drawn regardless of the sizeof the overall scene. The only limitation which thesize of the scene has lies in the memory used for thegrass field’s hierarchical rasterization structure. Thedifference in the performance between the basic andthe instanced method can be seen at the 300x300 and600x600 sized instances. Even when drawing complexobjects, the optimized basic version is clearly fasterthan the instanced version. However, the basic versionis not able to render fields greater than 1000x1000,because then the application’s memory is full.

A numerical comparison of the performance betweenthe presented technique and the related papers men-tioned in Chapter 2 cannot be done correctly, becausemost of the related techniques use static level-of-detailand image based methods, whereas our method onlyuses dynamic level-of-detail and geometry. The mainadvantage of the presented algorithm is its flexibility,so that it is extensible and can easily fit to any possiblescene. This is because in each frame, the blades are pro-cedurally generated inside the shader. With our method,also grass-like scenes like for example a wheat field canbe rendered, which is shown in Figure 12. In addition,

Figure 11: The rendered image of the Instance scene.

Figure 12: The grass-rendering technique applied to awheat field.

grass rendered with the proposed technique can be usedin physically correct simulations, since each blade ofgrass can be influenced by its environment seperately.

Compared to Boulanger et al. [1], our technique en-ables each single blade to be animated and influencedby forces at all distances, since the grass field is com-pletely rendered as geometry. Wang et al. [7] can alsoanimate each single blade of grass seperately, but dueto the high amount of vertices which have to be storedfor a scene, the grass field can only be sparse in order toachieve interactive framerates. The difference betweenour method and the related works can be seen in Figure13 and Figure 14.

The mentioned scenes and effects can also be seen inmotion on the accompanying video and a more detailedview of the grass and flowers can be seen in Figure 15.

8 CONCLUSION AND FUTUREWORK

Although rendering dense grass fields completely as ge-ometry seemed to be impossible for a long time, thispaper introduced a quite simple method which is ableto draw large grass scenes in real time using the tessel-lation shaders as geometry enhancement tool. One ofthe main advantages is its flexibility regarding different

Figure 13: The left image shows a picture of a grassfield with a tornado-like wind taken from [7] andthe right one shows a similar scene rendered withour method, where the tornado is simulated with aforcemap.

Figure 14: The left image shows a picture of a footballfield taken from [1] and the right one shows a similarscene rendered with our method.

Figure 15: A more detailed view of the grass and theflowers.

scenes, since the blades of grass are procedurally gen-erated inside the shader. Following this aspect, manyextensions can be made to the proposed technique. Forexample, a life-time model can be implemented, mak-ing grass grow over time, or the grass can adapt itselfto its environment, like growing along the shape of ob-jects. Until now the grass can only grow in y-direction,but it might be simple to give each blade of grass a di-rection, so that grass can grow on arbitrary locations.For example, grassy objects or roots of undergroundscenes can be rendered using this approach.

In the technique as presented, each blade of grass canbe influenced by forces, but the animation and inter-action is just a simple simulation. A physically basedwind and bending model with collision detection, likein [7], has to be implemented for more realistic lookingscenes.

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[2] Gerald E. Farin and Dianne Hansford. The essen-tials of CAGD. A K Peters, 2000.

[3] Ralf Habel, Michael Wimmer, and Stefan Jeschke.Instant Animated Grass. Journal of WSCG, 15(1-3):123–128, 2007.

[4] Fabrice Neyret. A General and Multiscale Modelfor Volumetric Textures. In Graphics Interface,pages 83–91. Canadian Human-Computer Com-munications Society, 1995.

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[6] Musawir A. Shah, Jaakko Kontinnen, and SumantaPattanaik. Real-time rendering of realistic-lookinggrass. In Proceedings of the 3rd internationalconference on Computer graphics and interactivetechniques in Australasia and South East Asia,GRAPHITE ’05, pages 77–82, New York, NY,USA, 2005. ACM.

[7] Changbo Wang, Zhangye Wang, Qi Zhou, Cheng-fang Song, Yu Guan, and Qunsheng Peng. Dy-namic modeling and rendering of grass waggingin wind: Natural phenomena and special effects.Comput. Animat. Virtual Worlds, 16(3-4):377–389,July 2005.

[8] Xiangkun Zhao, Fengxia Li, and Shouyi Zhan.Real-time animating and rendering of large scalegrass scenery on gpu. In Proceedings of the 2009International Conference on Information Technol-ogy and Computer Science - Volume 01, pages601–604. IEEE Computer Society, 2009.