Thanks for all the comments on what grass looked best!

I've tweaked and corrected a lot of things and made the grass a bit more
saturated. The flowers may still look like they're floating, but there's not
much to do about that I'm afraid.

But anyway, almost everybody seemed to like better the image produced by the
new technique I'm working on rather than that produced by my old Fast Grass
Include File. I'm very pleased that the new include file will not only have
the advantage that it works in animations, but also that it looks better in
general.

The catch is that it renders about 4 times slower than the old technique,
but it's still pretty fast. The attached image was rendered at 800x600 AA0.3
in about 8 minutes on my Athlon XP 1700+. As I have never tried using mesh
grass, I don't know how slow that is for comparison. Anyone got any idea how
long an equivalent image with mesh grass would take?

Rune
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Attachments:
Download 'fgrass2_test.jpg' (87 KB)

Preview of image 'fgrass2_test.jpg'

Superb! Really good! I think meshes will at least use more memory resources,
even with all currently possible tricks.. About the rendertime, it depends a
lot on AA settings.. Did you use standard AA?  If so, the grass texture is
not terribly fast.

Regards,
Hugo

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"Hugo" wrote:
> Superb! Really good!

Woohoo! Thanks. :)

> I think meshes will at least use more memory resources,
> even with all currently possible tricks..

Yeah, if nothing else, my method takes up practically zero memory,
completely independent on how big the field of grass is.

> About the rendertime, it depends a lot on AA settings..
> Did you use standard AA?  If so, the grass texture is
> not terribly fast.

No, that's what I was afraid. I did use standard AA. I guess I'll have to
try to use some of the mesh grass macros around and see the pros and cons
myself.

Which mesh grass macro is the best for a curvy height_field like this?

Rune
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I wrote:
> > About the rendertime, it depends a lot on AA settings..
> > Did you use standard AA?  If so, the grass texture is
> > not terribly fast.
>
> No, that's what I was afraid. I did use standard AA. I
> guess I'll have to try to use some of the mesh grass
> macros around and see the pros and cons myself.

I tried to use Gilles Tran's MakeGrass macro to create a whole field of real
mesh grass, and it rendered twice as fast as my faked texture grass. :(

However, Gilles' macro can only create grass on flat surfaces AFAIK. Since
using many copies of the same mesh isn't possible to the same extent when
covering hills with grass, maybe doing that with mesh grass would still be
less efficient, or even impossible on many machines?

Rune
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3D images and anims, include files, tutorials and more:
Rune's World:  http://rsj.mobilixnet.dk (updated Feb 16)
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JRG's scatter macro can do curved surfaces, I'm working on a similar idea
with grass support
(see thread Vegetation Project WIP 3/27/02 by Tim Nikias)

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 RAY

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"Rune" wrote:
> Which mesh grass macro is the best for a curvy height_field like this?

Try Gilles' macro. Of course you have to modify it, as it presently does not support
heightfields. AFAIK at least one pover (Tony[B]?) has already done that. So ask him.
:)


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"RAY" wrote:
> JRG's scatter macro can do curved surfaces, I'm working on a similar idea
> with grass support
> (see thread Vegetation Project WIP 3/27/02 by Tim Nikias)

You are probably referring to my old clutter macro. The last scatter macro I wrote is
not very suitable for such a task.

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Home: http://digilander.iol.it/jrgpov

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> You are probably referring to my old clutter macro. The last scatter macro
I wrote is
> not very suitable for such a task.
 Oops.

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 RAY

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This grass looks a lot different than and mesh grass that I have seen. And
so, for that reason, has a lot of value even if it is slower.

 -Shay

Rune <run### [at] mobilixnetdk> wrote in message
news:3ca674d4@news.povray.org...

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"JRG" wrote:
> "Rune" wrote:
> > Which mesh grass macro is the best for a
> > curvy height_field like this?
>
> Try Gilles' macro. Of course you have to modify it,
> as it presently does not support heightfields.
> AFAIK at least one pover (Tony[B]?) has already
> done that. So ask him. :)

Have done, but he seems to may have lost it...

Anyway, I tried some grass made by Alan Holding which works for
height_fields.

When using a medium sized field of grass, his mesh grass renders about as
fast as my faked grass, when taking into account the parsing. Both images
were finished in two minutes at 320x240. However, when increasing the number
of blades, the parse time of the mesh grass increases very much, and
exceeded half an hour in my test. The larger the field, the higher memory
requirement and longer parsing time there is for mesh grass. In contrast, my
faked grass has no parse time at all, nor any significant memory
requirement, no matter the size of the field. So my faked grass is best
suited for large fields of grass.

Rune
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