This is superb, thank you lars.
I ran the web player…and noticed some “ghosting” or stretching of some of the grass, blowing like crazy. Maybe just my machine though.
@jc_lvngstn: i guess this occurs near the water plane and only in forward rendering mode?
i don’t know why but this could be the reflection camera not using the modified shader, because this floating around of grass is what you get when you use the standard grass shaders on imported geometry…
@norby: no – for the basic heightmap i used geocontrol, for basic texturing unity terrain tools. but there is a lot of hand work involved as well
looks great, shadow distance in the demo between forward and deferred seems inconsistent, and I was getting a strange (i think shader based) artifact around the nearest pond to start location with a shadow of the grass flicking across the pond.
@janpec: well, custom meshes for grass have always been supported – although they tend to float around for the bending is applied to a whole cluster and not a single “plant” or mesh.
my grass shader provides individual bending for each mesh. but the amount of bending is controlled by the vertex’ uv y-coordinate.
so there are certain restrictions for the meshes and how they have to be mapped. pretty easy for simple meshes like the fern or the reed shown in the demo – a bit more complex for a more “detailed” meshes like that of the flowers shown in the demo: not really a top model, as i am not a modeler at all, and with a rather weird uv mapping: everything but efficient – just a proof of concept and my first attempt to model and map some bit more complex geometry fitting the constrains of the shader.
