Nico EllGeneration, rendering and simulation of grass and meadow
Bachelor Thesis in Computational Visualistics at University Koblenz
About
To complete my bachelor’s degree in Computational Visualistics, I researched the topic of grass rendering and developed a prototype in the Unity Engine. The full thesis is available for download (in german language) and the source code can be accessed on Github.
Abstract
Grass is largely responsible for the look and feel of fertile landscapes. Its rendering in real-time applications is often made possible by using image-based approximations of the high geometric complexity. Recently, the computationally intensive yet high quality rendering of many single grass blades has become popular. The aim of this bachelor thesis is to seamlessly combine geometric grass blades with image-based billboard representations. Custom shaped grass blades are the basis for generating textures for billboards. Both representations use the same underlying simulation model and thus, multiple wind sources and hundreds of arbitrary shaped collision objects affect the entire meadow in the same way. Furthermore a low memory footprint is taken into account and an analysis of performance-limiting factors on GPU calculations is delivered.