Grass.

They're really annoying

Photo by Stephanie Moody on Unsplash

• Itchy
• Full of bugs

But most infuriating of all,

• THERE ARE SO MANY BLADES OF GRASS IN A FIELD

Grass is...

Photo by Stephanie Moody on Unsplash

Hundreds of individual moving things = Lag

Millions of individual moving things

= ------------

How

How do they grass

Fake it

Literally just two PNGs

(that looks like multiple blades of grass)

Copy it

Since its just 2 PNGs

we can afford to place many

Kinda looks like a field

But what if

• You need a really, REALLY big field of grass
• Too lazy to place them individually, but still want to make it natural
• Your target playerbase is using an iPhone SE

Shell Texturing

An ILLUSION made with

many, transparent layers stacked on top of each other

Touched Grass Successfully

• Works right out of the box (Wind simulation and height distribution done globally)
• Increasing grass coverage has little performance impact
• Highly compatible with preexisting lighting model
• Change layer count to easily balance between quality and performance

Scalability

It's so scalable that it is often used to render fur on a more complex surface

More Performant

Less Performant

More Fidelity / Layers

Less Fidelity / Layers

Breaking the Illusion

(Don't look at it from the side)