Here are some first grass attempts for a piece I’m working on. There are 4,096 blades of grass with about 15 circular segments per blade. The are built with VBO’s running at about 50fps. I would love to get a few more FPS with some optimization.

watch HD here

Working on some grass for a piece I’m working on. This is my first time generating 3d geometry for a worm/grass. Oh man this is fun.

Finally got normals working for the height map. Brad helped me a ton with the math, thanks brad :). After making sure I had the right points its was pretty simple.

Here is an example to calculate normals for a grid in OpenFrameworks. Obviously this can be applied to any other language.

The image above we have four points on a plane. We need three of those points:

We now need a vector from p1 to p2 and p1 to p3.

We need the cross product of v1 and v2. This will give us our normal vector. Next we normalize that vector scale it and add p1.

Now render from p1 to normal vector.

Just got this new mount – it is great so excited :)

The terrain is now scrolling. I’m not using a VBO so its a bit slow but that’s an easy fix. I now want to try and apply a sphere to the grid.

These are some terrain height maps built from NOAA’s Planetary Maps. The images are super high res about 2000×1500 pixels, the geometry is calculated and a display list is used for rendering. I think next im going to try and create a VBO out of the geometry so that I can alter the map in realtime.