Grass Rendering Series

This is part 1 of a multi-part series on grass rendering. We’ll start by figuring out how realistic grass should look like, and how herbage can be modeled with the tools we have at our disposal in real-time 3D graphics. Then, we’ll look at how to implement different methods of grass rendering in Godot. However, most of the tutorial will not be Godot-specific aside from some node names and syntax. But before getting into any implementation details, we must first understand what grass even looks like. What Does Grass Look Like?# Some of the visual properties are quite surprising if you have never really paid attention to them. For one, grass is shiny, especially long grass. Check out the specular hightlights in this example: Although the random orientations of all the individual grass blades causes quite a rough appearance when looking at an entire field of grass - the specular highlights average out into a diffuse noise - the individual blades actually have quite strong specular ref ... Read full article.