Some reworkings

As I mentioned a few times before, I really dislike the way new grass looks. Way too high by default, and when it’s set to be short, it just looks horrible. So here is an attempt #2: this time without any textures. Instead, each grass blade is a bit of geometry, five triangles for closer ones, one triangle in distance. Takes twice as much time to generate (I think it might be improved by adding skipping each 2nd frame), renders a bit faster, overall takes similar amount of time as before. And, no magic here, at low height it still doesn’t cover everything. 

But notice how much less weird whole surface-grass transition is! Now ground works with geometrical grass to create a complete look instead of billboardy grass desperately fighting and trying to cover the surface beneath.

Whole LODs transition is way smoother now too. And it can get some nice per-blade shading with saturated backlit (wrongly not shadowed in the video) and specular, plus a bit of noise texture keeping it less solid-colored.

Unfortunately that does mean some features, like high grass, per-track textures, specific types of grass or flowers, won’t work now. Well, high grass might work to some extend, but it might look too simple. I’ll try to find a solution allowing to bring some stuff back in, but realistically speaking, it seems like absolute most of racing tracks don’t need all that, and instead, they need grass which is short and tidy.

As for per-track customizations, instead of missing textures, I’ll try and make generation more adjustable, like height, bend of it and all that.

(At the end of the video, it shows different LODs in different colors, to highlight how many of those blades are there.)

And those headlights are almost ready too. There was new pretty cool discovery: it turns out the whole thing works pretty well with more modern lights, so now I added reflective map to support something more complicated than just chromy reflector, plus optional dynamic emissives map to support different lamps under the same glass. Now only thing left is to make it respect color and alpha values from original diffuse texture for glass tint and thickness, and fine tune a few things here and there. 

Assetto Corsa - New grass (YouTube)