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Patches of grass
July 7, 2008 - 5:12am
- 626 reads
I wasn't sure where to put this thread, but this looked like the right topic.
I'm kinda wondering about something lately. I've been playing a lot of Call Of Duty 4 and some Viking: Battle for Asgard and in these games are a lot of patches of grass to make it look like the grassy area is pretty dense.
I was wondering if someone (maybe Riki? 
) knows: Do developers put in every single one of these patches manually? Or do they have some kind of Painting software?
Grtz Rob
In a game like CoD4, it definitely seems like a procedural thing. There's far too much ground for it to be placed by hand, and all the ground textures are similar. (dirt, dirt, dirt, grass, grass, grass) So to me I would think the programmers would set the grass meshes to be procedurally placed on the grass terrain textures, scattered around.
On a game like Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, with large open fields and cobblestone paths, they had certain textures that were identical except one would have _nograss (or something similar) at the end of it (or at least, it was imported twice into the editor and both were labeled differently, one with the _nograss as one of the options...it's been a while since I've messed with it). This would allow the engine to recognize not to place the 3d grass mesh on top.
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Its done differently with different engines and situations. Inside UE3 they have the deco layer on terrain, this lets you automatically generate meshes based off the material you paint on the unreal terrain.
On Blacksite we didn't have a whole lot of grass needs so we made a variety of patch sizes and just sprinkled them where needed. The patches could range from very small, to a line of grass for walkways, to even huge patches for driving areas.
Generally i would say all of that is hand placed but for large areas where that is just too much, the programmers will figure a way out to procedurally generate the placement of it. That's really what it ends up boiling down to, how long it will take.
Riki
-Riki