As proposed by Dulac the "parallax mapping" technique is surely the way to make grass nice and efficient.
So now that I have found how to use shaders in DS2 the next thing to use is the make this nice looking shader. Dungeon siege 2 uses HLSL shaders of directx9 (I think), and this is really good. We can make really beautiful shaders with it.
But firstly let's talk about how DS2 handle this.
[t:tsd,n:b_t_fh00_fieldpatch-01]
{
technique = GrassSurface;
layer1texture1 = b_t_fh00_fieldpatch-01;
i texturedetail = 2;
layer2texture1 = b_em_grass01;
i texturedetail = 2;
}
This is a gas file link to a texture and the technique is a .fx file where the shader is written. In DS2 you can have 4 layers, so what could be done if we manage to make the shader is to have every texture with grass having the technique as shader and the layer with the grass used.
There are multiple technique to render grass nicely with shaders.
The first one is really powerful but a bit too much for the game. http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems/gpugems_ch07.html
This is an nvidia site with a lot of shaders, it's really great but I don't really know if we can use it because it's using really current techniques, but if it works it could make such a nice render. There are much more than grass on this site, it's talking about water, fire and much more.
Here is another one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyQ6c17TYeU
It's just a video but it seems to be closer to what we are looking for. If I'm right there are 4 layers : the terrain, the top grass, down grass and the grass shadow.
I'll make more researches than that and I'm working on a shader at the moment in order to have a fist view. And with shaders I am thinking about modifying some graphics values of the game to make a updated render, like having a bit more contrast and so on. A bit like ENB in Bethesda's games. I don't really know if it's possible but it could be really interesting as well as having a updated look of the terrains.
As proposed by Dulac the "parallax mapping" technique is surely the way to make grass nice and efficient.
So now that I have found how to use shaders in DS2 the next thing to use is the make this nice looking shader. Dungeon siege 2 uses HLSL shaders of directx9 (I think), and this is really good. We can make really beautiful shaders with it.
But firstly let's talk about how DS2 handle this.
This is a gas file link to a texture and the technique is a .fx file where the shader is written. In DS2 you can have 4 layers, so what could be done if we manage to make the shader is to have every texture with grass having the technique as shader and the layer with the grass used.
There are multiple technique to render grass nicely with shaders.
The first one is really powerful but a bit too much for the game.
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems/gpugems_ch07.html
This is an nvidia site with a lot of shaders, it's really great but I don't really know if we can use it because it's using really current techniques, but if it works it could make such a nice render. There are much more than grass on this site, it's talking about water, fire and much more.
Here is another one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyQ6c17TYeU
It's just a video but it seems to be closer to what we are looking for. If I'm right there are 4 layers : the terrain, the top grass, down grass and the grass shadow.
I'll make more researches than that and I'm working on a shader at the moment in order to have a fist view. And with shaders I am thinking about modifying some graphics values of the game to make a updated render, like having a bit more contrast and so on. A bit like ENB in Bethesda's games. I don't really know if it's possible but it could be really interesting as well as having a updated look of the terrains.