"realistic grass"

[Geonox]

Morrowind is very unnatural, there is no grass. Nowere! And the grass which I've seen ingame is not very nice, sorry Beth. So that's why I decided to make some new grass models. But how to make realistic grass? I realy don't know how to do it with pixelshading so I made it with transparent textures. These screenshots which you are about to see are ingame [well ingame, ineditor] screenshots. So no pixelshading or no fooling 3d max renders. My pc is kind of slow, it already has problems viewing Balmora so I tried to keep the poly count low: each grass model contains 192 polys. I hope that ain't to much but I don't want to hold you up, hope you like it:

 

Screenhots are taken in the editor so it will pretty much look the same ingame note that the lightning is different ingame so I have to fix the textures so that it looks nice ingame.

 

Here they are:

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v600/Geonox/Geonox_grassbig.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v600/Geonox/geonox_biggrass2.jpg

 

Details of the grass:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v600/Geonox/Geonox_grass2.jpg

 

I'm not sure how to release this, putting it ingame will cost me a huge amount of time so I think I'm going to release this as a modders resource. Sorry for the people who can't mod!

But still Hope ya like it!

 

-Geo

[_Atti_]

each grass model contains 192 polys.

 

how do you mean "each"?

 

anyhow it looks good:)

[ensis]

I'm guessing he means he's made one (or a few) models of a section of grass. You then just lay them out side by side on the area you want grass in.

[Slaiv]

Very, very, very nice.... :)

 

I'm sure somebody here will know how to release it as a mod.... Or you could get someone to help you. I assume doing so would mean going throughout the entire continent and placing this shtuff wherever grass shoudl be... I can see how that would be a lot of work. I dunno - maybe a script could do it. Ask around - somebody's bound to know how to.

[Geonox]

each grass model contains 192 polys.

 

how do you mean "each"?

 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Well the grass models are actually very simple. Each model is build out of several tubes which have a tga. transparent texture on it. This will give you the effect of "realistic grass" without modelling every grass-spike. You can see very clearly in this shot what a grass model look like:

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v600/Geonox/Geonox_grass.jpg

 

On the right you can clearly see some kind of tube model. That's how I made this grass. If you look from the top it will be very unrealistic to see the grass growing in circles so I added several smaller tubes in the model. So that the grass looks a lot more realistic. This way you will get simple low poly and nice grass ingame and it will give you the illusion of a real field of gras. I can animate the grass by simply animating the textures. that will be a lot of work so I'm not sure if I'm going to animate it. I'm still working on the grass, to get the right colors.

 

@ Slaiv: Yeah well I'm just going to release this as a grass pack, with several types of grass and matching ground textures. So it will be a modders resource for everyone who want to use it. I'm not going to ask someone to do it for me. I'm sorry for those who can't mod but putting this ingame myself with a team takes to much time for me. :( I realy want to but hey who knows. First I have to make some adjustments to the grass models, I've just tested the original ones ingame and they were to tall and I had some trouble with the collision. You have to be able to walk through it but somehow I can't. So I have to fix that first... ;)

[_Atti_]

hm..how about stretching out the tops of those tubes a bit?i think it would look even better..also edit it a bit so it wont be a perfect tube...

[Geonox]

They are already stretched here's a quick drawing which I did in photoshop which explains how the models are made:

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v600/Geonox/grass.jpg

 

The red one is the base model, I added two or three of the same models but in a smaller size in the middle of the tube. Those two are the blue, and the smaller yellow one. It's very simple and it does not need much polys. When you put a lot of these models in one spot you will not even see that these are tubes anymore but it will look like a grass plane. This makes it look like the grass is put one by one into the ground. Only if you look from a very high point down to the grass it will look a bit odd but this can be fixed by adding the right ground textures which pretty much blend in with the grass.