GPU Pro 5

1

III

Screen-Space Grass

David Pangerl

1.1 Introduction

Grass is a fundamental part of any outdoor nature scene. Unfortunately, grass

is also a difficult and complex thing to render realistically due to its abundance.

(See, for example, Figure 1.1.)

In this chapter we present a novel technique for realistically rendering mid-

ground and background grass in screen space. This technique was developed for

the games Agricultural Simulator 2013 and Industry Giant 3.

1.2 Motivation

The usual approach for rendering grass in the distance requires generating and

processing a large amount of geometry or instances, and this consumes a lot

Figure 1.1. An example scene ...