Realistic Grass Rendering
This work was my final year dissertation. It was the research and development of a method that could prove capable of rendering realistic grass applicable for real-time applications.
My research led me to investigate current image-based rendering techniques such as direct texture mapping, billboarding and dynamic imposters. However, these lacked the detail and view-dependant parallax required for rendering high-fidelity grass.
The method I used was based upon many of the principles of a method presented by Boulanger. The grass is rendered using geometry and volumetric slices. However, instead of interpolating over an approximated Bidirectional Texture Function (BTF) dataset to calculate the lighting, tangent-space normals of the volumetric slices are stored to calculate lighting at run-time. This reduces the dataset size, frees the method from a single BRDF, and could be used with a deferred shading system.
Work continues on this project to implement shadows and variable terrain.
