2010-09-19, 09:55 PM
Snake Eater's grass gave me some ideas.
First of all you can definitely see the interlacing when spinning the camera in Snake Eater. My only guess is the KFIV technique was an attempt to have faster turn speeds without noticeable interlacing artifacts. That I think was a good idea... but apparently the KFIV team for all the beauty of that game were too stupid to figure out the analog stick. Because while moving slow there would be no interlacing probs. And while moving fast the blur effect would've made more sense.
Anyway the grass in Snake Eater is the same mud sprinkled with green globules, but it has a lot of tall grass models liberally planted everywhere to make up for the underbrush. The grass doesn't move realistically under the NPC's feet. It actually just shrinks into the ground like some rascally rabbit was pulling carrots into his burrow from under the ground. Still if you don't pay attention it's a pretty effective illusion.
Now I've already been thinking about an alternative simple shadow technique for Som. If I can get the lighting really streamlined, I figure it will look better to replace the flat shadows with per pixel ambient black light sources which only effect the tile graphics. That way the lights would not light the feet of the monster/npc casting the shadow because that would probably not help the illusion. Objects could also be shadowed that way if they were flagged as non monster/npcs in this new system I'm working on.
Anyway by adding the shadows to the shader constants, the same shadows could be used in a custom vertex shader to signal to grass that it's being walked over. The closer the grass is to the shadow the more it lays down so to speak. The bigger the shadow, the bigger the area of grass it covers. The details are not really important, I'm sure it would work out one way or another however your 3D (2D grass would probably not work so well) grass was setup.
First of all you can definitely see the interlacing when spinning the camera in Snake Eater. My only guess is the KFIV technique was an attempt to have faster turn speeds without noticeable interlacing artifacts. That I think was a good idea... but apparently the KFIV team for all the beauty of that game were too stupid to figure out the analog stick. Because while moving slow there would be no interlacing probs. And while moving fast the blur effect would've made more sense.
Anyway the grass in Snake Eater is the same mud sprinkled with green globules, but it has a lot of tall grass models liberally planted everywhere to make up for the underbrush. The grass doesn't move realistically under the NPC's feet. It actually just shrinks into the ground like some rascally rabbit was pulling carrots into his burrow from under the ground. Still if you don't pay attention it's a pretty effective illusion.
Now I've already been thinking about an alternative simple shadow technique for Som. If I can get the lighting really streamlined, I figure it will look better to replace the flat shadows with per pixel ambient black light sources which only effect the tile graphics. That way the lights would not light the feet of the monster/npc casting the shadow because that would probably not help the illusion. Objects could also be shadowed that way if they were flagged as non monster/npcs in this new system I'm working on.
Anyway by adding the shadows to the shader constants, the same shadows could be used in a custom vertex shader to signal to grass that it's being walked over. The closer the grass is to the shadow the more it lays down so to speak. The bigger the shadow, the bigger the area of grass it covers. The details are not really important, I'm sure it would work out one way or another however your 3D (2D grass would probably not work so well) grass was setup.