1. Rendering of Realistic Grass (In Real Time) Sami Benzaid

2. Motivation  When playing video games, the more realistic the scenery is, the more immersive the experience.  Grass is typically very unrealistic. Close inspection of it in-game usually reveals that it either consists of static textures, or if it is made up of polygons, the grass is very sparse.

3. Game: Far Cry Website: http://www.falcon-nw.com/keltstake/hxd.asp

4. Website: http://www.kevinboulanger.net/grass.html

5. Eventual Goals  Understand a multitude different methods used to perform real-time rendering of grass, after surveying many papers on the subject.  Ideally, implement a piece of software that allows the user to move the camera around a virtual terrain full of realistic- looking (although not perfect) grass, in real-time.

6. Prior Work  E. Galin, P. Poulin. Real-time Rendering of Realistic-looking Grass.  BTFs (Bidirectional Texture Functions).  R. Cook et al. Stochastic Simplification of Aggregate Detail. (Pixar).  Displaying a random subset of visual elements.  Many others that I will be looking into.

7. Initial Idea  Try to combine polygons and textures, and make it look relatively realistic.  The grass closest to the camera is rendered using polygons. As it gets further away from the camera, less of it is rendered (perhaps a subset selected by the stochastic method described in the Pixar paper).  At a certain point, polygons are no longer used, but rather a pre-made set of static, flat, synthetic textures created from the grass geometry is used.  I plan to find pre-existing grass geometry to draw and create textures from.

8. More Details to Work Out  At this time, I still have some details to work out with regards to this project.  Aspects of the project are subject to minor changes.

9. Milestones  March 15: Finish doing preliminary research on grass rendering (reading papers, planning software implementation). Also, have already found grass geometry and generated some static textures.  April 07: Already be well into the development of my grass rendering implementation.  April 30: Be roughly finished with the implementation at this point, probably just trying to fix bugs.