Instant Animated Grass

Habel,R., Wimmer,M., Jeschke,S.

Abstract:
This paper introduces a technique for rendering animated grass in real time. The technique uses front-to-back compositing of implicitly defined grass slices in a fragment shader and therefore significantly reduces the overhead associated with common vegetation rendering systems. We also introduce a texture-based animation scheme that combines global wind movements with local turbulences. Since the technique is confined to a fragment shader, it can be easily integrated into any rendering system and used as a material in existing scenes.