Animated Grass beta

[peter_spy]

That grass demo is the worst approach you could take, as it's a frame by frame animation; it uses max limit of the T2 engine (99 frames) and runs like crap even on decent systems. Not that Gecko was ever known for subtle solutions...

[Dragofer]

5 hours ago, Wellingtoncrab said:

On the gameplay side any plans for the denser area grass to have something like a configurable light gem modifier when the player is crouched in them?

I could whip up a custom script that does this by comparing the player origin with the bounds of grass models and then applies a lightgem modifier.

No idea about a "proper" in-engine solution - maybe it'd be something similar.

[JackFarmer]

@Dragofer

I've tried it with the "Myth" area (you know what I mean). Since the terrain is very bumpy, it does not really work (and it is a cave where you would not expect wind); thus will keep the static grass as per the screenhot on Discord.

[Dragofer]

Just now, JackFarmer said:

Since the terrain is very bumpy, it does not really work (a

Do you mean because of difficulties aligning the grass with the floor? That wasnt easy for me either, at least with the large grass models.

[JackFarmer]

4 minutes ago, Dragofer said:

Do you mean because of difficulties aligning the grass with the floor? That wasnt easy for me either, at least with the large grass models.

Exactly.

[Wellingtoncrab]

@JackFarmerThe “patches” are a good fit for this type of circumstance - a few go a long way

@Dragoferyeah I would say crouching in the grass occludes the player vision in such a way it would not really be fair for the ai to look right through it, but maybe this can just be done via a trigger volume placed by the mapper?

Edited January 7, 2023 by Wellingtoncrab

[kin]

On 1/7/2023 at 8:15 PM, Daft Mugi said:

After reading some quips about Thief HD Mod, I looked at its moddb page.

By coincidence, there's an animated grass demo for Thief. Dropping a video here for those interested.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/thief-gold-hd-texture-mod/news/wind-simulated-vegetation-natural-water-mod

 

I don't know if this simulation is hardware intensive but dark mod got to have this (optimised). It will change the face of the game positively. The only thing missing is the vegetation alpha texture casting shadows.

 

edit: Wait am I reading correct, is this simulation for thief 1&2? Still got to have it in dark mod too. Amazing!

Edited January 10, 2023 by kin

[peter_spy]

That's frame-by-frame image animation, he uses 99 frames per grass piece and these are 2k to 4k textures(!). The resolution alone is insane for a grass piece, not to mention flipping between 99 textures of such resolution. There's no point in recreating that approach unless you want your computer to explode. Frankly, it's a miracle that NewDark is able to run this thing at all.

[HMart]

peter_spy is right that is total overkill, for grass at lest and imo the wrong approach (specially with such high rez textures), thou I know is the "easy" and only approach for those that can't use shaders. The right approach but harder to those that don't know shader coding, is to create a vertex shader that moves each vertices of the grass plane.

Btw this is possible to do, more or less realistically, even in the original idtech4, without making a new shader or using frame animations. 

 

textures/nature/grass  
{
   nonsolid
   noimpact
   noShadows
   noSelfShadow
   
	qer_editorimage textures/nature/plant_ed.jpg
	
    {
        blend   diffusemap
        map    textures/nature/plant_d.tga
		rotate	.003*sintable[ time *.2 ]
    }
	
	
	{
		blend bumpmap
		map	textures/nature/plant_local.tga
		rotate	.003*sintable[ time *.2 ]
	}
}

 

Edited January 10, 2023 by HMart

[kin]

On 1/5/2023 at 10:04 PM, Dragofer said:

Kingsal has graciously converted the highly map-specific animated grass from Arcturus' gorgeous "moonlit castle by a lake with grass plains blowing in the wind" demo map into something that can easily be used by mappers, now also featuring different varieties of grass, different sizes, 2 different wind speeds and LOD stages:

I'd like to run a small beta of this asset here for mappers to try it out in their FMs, so feedback on it (i.e. animation, performance impact, looks) before it gets added to core assets would be very appreciated. I won't go too much into the details because the entity & spawnarg tooltips are part of the testing.

You can grab the asset here and just drop the .pk4 in the folder of your FM, no need to unpack it. Look for the animated entities in the entity menu. Once the assets are in core you can just delete the .pk4.

This is perfect and it seems it can easily be applied on existing missions dramaticaly improving the looks. Only thing missing (wich I am sure it will eventually implemented) is this grass casting shadows.

 

[lowenz]

6 hours ago, kin said:

Only thing missing (wich I am sure it will eventually implemented) is this grass casting shadows.

SSAO exists for that 

Edited January 11, 2023 by lowenz

[AluminumHaste]

I know this has been said before but when creating a pk4 for mission please stop including consolehistory.dat and qconsole.log.

When you do this and install the map, you can open the console and cycle through all the commands that the author typed on their computer.

Instead of cycling through your own console command history. It's really annoying having to retype a bunch of commands that should be in my history when pressing up in the console.

[kin]

3 hours ago, lowenz said:

SSAO exists for that 

I meant casting shadows from a light source. Though still looks good. I could even compare it to modern game implementation of grass without any real difference.

Edited January 11, 2023 by kin

[peter_spy]

Modern games are using modeled blades of grass these days; that eliminates problems with transparency overdraw and technically you can make every single blade cast a shadow, but that's probably quite sub optimal

[JackFarmer]

On 1/7/2023 at 12:32 PM, Dragofer said:

I've tried using SEED to automatically clone and distribute a model across a large terrain patch, but the performance was single-digits, probably a lot worse than if the same number of models had been hand placed.

I've always wanted to ask about this, because I had the same problem; even on a minimally detailed map, the framerate immediately went down dramatically, and so I took it out again (though it looked fine).

[AluminumHaste]

Well I covered my valley map with grass and while LOD tries it's best, FPS drops from 250 fps to 50ish.

Still not gonna compete with modern engines with grass everywhere.

[kingsal]

Yeah SEED is kind of a strange beast. In some situations its tanked my FPS as well. 

There's definitely no competing with modern engines here, there are other options: animated UVs, switching to static mesh LODs at long distance (I might try this), but all of them have pros and cons. I'll keep messing around with them and see if I can get them more performant and still looking decent. 

[Dragofer]

On 1/14/2023 at 3:16 PM, AluminumHaste said:

Well I covered my valley map with grass and while LOD tries it's best, FPS drops from 250 fps to 50ish.

Still not gonna compete with modern engines with grass everywhere.

It would be interesting to see how the FPS is when you use func_static versions of the grass instead. This way we would know how much of this drop is caused by (A) lots of transparent textures and (B) lots of animated models.

If the problem is more the latter, then it could be remedied by using larger merged models, and maybe there are some low-hanging fruit for optimising the animation code.

The former would require simplification of the mesh, to the detriment of the visual quality.

[kin]

On 1/11/2023 at 7:06 PM, peter_spy said:

Modern games are using modeled blades of grass these days; that eliminates problems with transparency overdraw and technically you can make every single blade cast a shadow, but that's probably quite sub optimal

So if someone modeled vegetation with low count polygons (grass, tree leaves) would that cast stencil shadows? Wouldn't the gain in fps from using stencil cover the lag caused from maps and alpha?

Edited January 25, 2023 by kin

[peter_spy]

Yup, it would cast both types of shadows.

In terms of performance, it always depends on how you execute it. But in terms of geometry, the engine seem to be able to handle a few millions of tris per scene, if you keep other factors (like drawcalls) low. Clever LODing should do the trick here.

Edited January 25, 2023 by peter_spy