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.
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:
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.