Real-time rendering of realistic-looking grass

Abstract

The absence of accurately rendered grass in real-time applications such as games and simulation systems can be directly attributed to the massive amounts of geometry required to model grass patches. This in turn is responsible for the drastic increase in the computational complexity of light transport for global illumination. Our work attempts to fill the void by presenting an image-based algorithm for interactive rendering of realistic-looking grass. A bidirectional texture function (BTF) is constructed and employed in combination with a view-dependent depth map to synthesize a grass texture for given viewing and illumination conditions. In addition to the visual effects captured by BTFs, our method is able to produce grass silhouettes as well as account for external occluders such as rocks and other objects scattered over a grass field.