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I have been working on WeedWorks over the past month or two as a freeware application which is to be released to the public. WeedWorks allows you to create grass, groundcover, weeds and other forms of plants and vegetation for your 3d or 2d environment.



Some of the features that WeedWorks includes:
3D Grass, groundcover and vegetation
2D billboarding of 1 or multiple limbs of vegetation
Expots to .DBO and .X (with more formats to come in the near future)
Real-time vegetation creation
Real-time vegetation controls and modification

Currently I have a few things that I would like to add, they are as follows:
Bi-planar billboard exportation
Alpha mapped vegetation (this should be used sparingly as it is much more resource intensive)
Alpha mapped camera facing flora
Vegetation Stalks (for stems and stalks)
Vegetation Heirarchy (for parent and child vegetation nodes)
Real-time UV mapping and UI

Currently the grass looks decent, but not phonomenal. Snapping the grass to the terrain makes a huge difference, and mix it up with some alpha-mapped foilage and it looks great. So my current and future focus for this will be improving the appearance of the grass. As of today, I do not yet have a publicly downloadable version of WeedWorks but expect one within the next week or so. Currently this project is closed source but will remain FREE to the public. There will be an integrated version of WW built into TerrainScape which will have an improved set of instructions and abilities, making creation and placement of vegetation into your scene completely seemless.

Youtube and ImageShack are both being a bit slow today, so in the meantime, here is an image located on one of my servers:

Youtube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RFZhdXtUQs


Here are the screenies from my TerrainScape thread:

The Default 'clump' of grass:


Le Color Picker:


Look at all the beautiful weeds


Mess with the base offset modifier a bit and turn on the camera light


Same scene, no light


Random colorization method:


Lower the base offset:


Raise the base offset:


I would like to open up this thread for comments, suggestions and feature requests... Have at it!

Current Build:
7-13-07 Alpha Release 1
http://www.fantasymultimedia.com/WWAlpha.rar

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Post Edited, youtube link is now in first post.

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Intresting application Alquerian.This will certainly solve the grass folliage issue people have lot.

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Alquerian, this is very nice and appears that it will be very usefull.

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This looks really cool!

Great job so far. I would like to know how many polies the weeds are, though. I think this is going to definitely come in handy.

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POD, JosephB and Xeno - Thanks for the compliments


Currently each blade is just one poly, so take the # of polys * # of limbs (or clumps) and you have your poly count. I will be adding some poly data on screen as well as other useful feedback and debug data. I think in that video, the largest amount of polys I had on the screen at any given time was 2k, which isn't bad . Combine the even balance of objects and limbs then throw in LiT's limb culling and you will be amazed at the results

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This looks and sounds great! I can't wait to get some of this stuff into DBP and FPSC when the demo or full thing is released!

Keep up the good work!

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I've been waiting for this one It goes without saying that this grass will be in Geisha House. This is fantastic because the grass will be faster and look better than the standard alpha mapped solution.

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This is great! Finally I'll be able to add some quality grass to my games without having to pay a sum of money.

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Veron - I will be releasing a full version which is occasionally updated with new features, requests and bug fixes. I don't aim to make this an all-inclusive vegetation app, however in the future you should be able to make a wide variety of different types of vegetation with it.

Cash - I am truly honored to hear you say that. You know how I feel about Geisha House and for some of my work to be used to help build it is a real compliment. Something that alpha mapped grass won't do well is switch between top-down and first person mode very well. Actually it would look like crap if it were attempted However with Weedworks, that is not an issue as it is true 3d grass.

Sixty - Thanks! This is free to everyone, private or commercial. Recognition in the credits would be nice but not necessary Several more features will be coming soon, as will the public download.

Everyone - I am relying upon suggestions and your consideration to make improvements and additions to this. Granted not all suggestions will be implemented, I will give every concept it's due consideration.

Thanks for following my thread!

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Really nice application. Is it possible to import a image to use as a texture?

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Wow, that's great! Can't wait till it's finished

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Yes, that is one of the very next things that is to be implemented. This application was initially designed to be very lightweight, however I think it would only be fair to meet the demands of the masses and appease them with a bit of eye-candy in the form of textures and alpha mapped plains.

I spent an hour or so today outside with my camera, looking at the different grasses and weeds. I took several photos and did a great deal of observing. I will be taking more photos tomorrow of more plant types, including flowers and different types of ground-cover. I will post those photos along with a strategic plan on how everyone here will be able to re-create these various types of vegetation. I am pleased with the positive responses I am getting on this thus far.

Thanks Game King. I will release it soon, however I don't want to release it until I have a few more features ready for distribution. I would hate to release it and have users abandon it, never to turn back because it wasn't all that it could be. Soon, I promise

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This is amazing, I am definitely using this in my MMO

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Try this model railroading site for some great looking ground cover textures null/www.woodlandscenics.comnull

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There are some interesting things there WildBill.

Anyways, I have some of my photos here, and I will be taking hundreds more. All of you are free to use these photos however you want, no restrictions. Most are of rockwork, grass and weeds and stuff. So many irons in the fire, as Cash already knows, I am developing a rock generator as well. I won't be working on that for awhile yet. I am taking photos of them while I am doing my vegetation photos, I am out and about in the middle of nature, I might as well

So these photos are more or less a 'study' of grass and weeds to mimic and work from. I would have more photos, but the last 2 days have been cold and rainy here. I would love for others to contribute to the photo collection if they could.











Enjoy

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Northern California looks very nice from what I'm seeing

And those pictures look great. Looks like your gonna pull off some amazing stuff from what your taking pictures of.

I can't wait to see the next few updates!

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@Cash:
Just use about eight layers of ground, alpha mapped. It should look good if you use the right textures.

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So im really looking forward to using this... it looks BEAUTIFUl... ummm whats the likelyhood that your grass will be able to be brushed ased when a player walks into it???

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Thanks Nemesis


Completely feesible. I will put together a demo of that when I get the chance.

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Well it warmed up a bit so I was able to take a few more photos. My goal is to find some ways to easily recreate what is seen in nature programatically, while allowing the user to control different aspects of how the vegetation works, thus providing an endless variety of realistic vegetation. Anyways, here are a few more of them:

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On Saturday I spent the day out hiking and taking photos. I was doing some field work to get in touch with not just what the different kinds of grasses and vegetation look like, but how they are arranged in groups, how they blend together and how they conform to the terrain and bend with the wind. Undoubtedly I found different types of vegetation at different elevations, certain kinds of vegetation seemed to 'cluster' together and disassociate themselves from other types (notice the desert sage and the desert rose) while the grass and weeds seemed to be pervasive just about everywhere. I will annotate next to the pictures that I found of interest.

I also made up a cute little logo for the WIP:


Here are some of the different types of grasses that were present:







Grass beneath a tree appears significantly different than grass in the open:


Notice the 'clumps' of grass here:



Close up of some taller grasses:


Here are some of the blooms and flowers that were found all around:







The desert rose:



The desert sage:


Misc. Vegetation:



Photos of Mixed vegetation and trees:






I also took a few pictures studying the terrain a little bit. I have some of those photos in the TerrainScape Thread.

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Intresting Pictures,your area is far more instresting then arounnd here.

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I have a picture of the tree outside my room.... I dunno if that will help or not, but considering its plants and relates to grass in a way, it might help.

Keep up the good work.

Cheers,

-Naota

Edit
Bah, that picture looks like crap and won't help at all. :/ Sorry 'bout that. If I had a nice picture of grass and other foliage larger than 320x240 pixels, I would definately send it your way.

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That's looking very nice. I can't wait until you release it, I will definitely be using this in Pirates of Port Royale. I was just looking for something like this last week when adding the trees .

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DB user 2006+ - Thanks for trying, too bad it didn't turn out. I would love any pictures I could get from you and other members here on the forum.

Gil Galvanti - I think that is part of the reason why I wrote this. I couldn't really find an application that did what I wanted it to. In some ways this will overlap plantlife, but it will definately have it's own niche and it will be free. I appreciate your comments!

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@Alquerian
Thanks, and good look.

Cheers,

-naota

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here is a flower from my gfs parents garden

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Thanks Indi that is a wonderful photo, I am looking for more just like this!

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Alquerian I am really intressted to try this out, looks amazing. Signing up for beta testing

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@Slooper - No problem, you will get an email of the pre-release.

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(I stole Cash's post seperation idea ^^ - (shh! Don't tell him!))

I actually have something other than photos of me running all over the mountains and off in the desert. That is right, I have an actual update to the software itself.

I played around with Cloggy's 3D line drawing utility, and it made a fairly nice grid layout for WeedWorks. I changed the normalization method so they display their coloring the way you would expect them to when they are scaled. Here are a few screens:




And I messed around with the blade width settings today as well. I am not really sure why anyone would want to make grass so thin, but you can do it as you see:


(Perhaps for an exhaust on a spaceship?)

And here is a denser scene with blade width variations:




I will be really pounding some code out over the next few weeks. I am not sure how busy I will get with contract work later this year so I will be taking this time to get as much work done as possible.

~Alq

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Alquerian - This and TerrainScape are looking really good. I thought I might help a little by pulling off to the side of the highway and taking a few shots for you on a resent trip. This is pure desert so not too much vegetation to get in the way. Anyway, it was 109 degrees out so I expect a free copy (haha) yes I did see that you were putting this out for free. It was a joke.

Anyway, I hope it helps even if just a little.

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TSchwarz - Thanks for the photos, is that down by Barstow/Southern California? It does get pretty hot down there I was just thinking yesterday about having a desert in my game, I am sure these will be useful for TerrainScape.

I would also like to have dead trees here and there in the forests. This is something I have not yet seen in oblivion, but it is something that I noticed was ever so common in real forests.

Here are a couple of small thumbs of some dead trees I noticed while in the forest a few weeks back:



Adding ugliness and death to a scene is just as important as making it majestic and beautiful, often times more important. Something as simple as a dead tree can be a subtle reminder that anything can die, it fills a void in our vacant minds about how fragile life really is.

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Pretty close, they were actually taken about 1/2 way between state line and baker. But, it's pretty hard to tell because that whole stretch from vegas to about victerville all looks the same.

Anyway, best of luck on TerrainScape

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Thanks Tschwarz


UPDATE
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In my free time today I was able to get started on some more of the options in WeedWorks, namely the alpha-mapped plains for flower and leafs and stuff. I know a lot of you have been asking for it, so here it is in it's infancy:



I still have a bit of work to do with their direction and I haven't even begun to optimize it. I have a lot of work to do on it and I have some interesting ideas of what can be made with this. I should have more time tomorrow to get more of this ironed out.

Till next time,
~Alq

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@Alquerian - will this be the application or will there also be a .dll plugin to do things like display 'grasses' on terrain in realtime and the like? and perhaps generate fractal terrain heightmaps?

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@Duffer
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=101658&b=8

@Alquerian
Nice work mate.


Cheers,

-naota

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These are good questions, they are answered in part accross this thread and the TerrainScape thread. This will be a standalone application, free to the public. On the other hand, TerrainScape will not be a free program, and it will include a version of WeedWorks which is fully-embedded. The TerrainScape version of WeedWorks will have many more options for the vegetation, such as snap to terrain and conform to terrain normals, terrain supertexture vertex color inheritance, and real time placement and manipulation of the vegetation in the terrain scene itself.

TerrainScape also already supports fractal based terrain. For more information, visit this link:
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=103391&b=8

@DBUser2006+ - Thanks Oh, did you ever get a chance to do a color picker in your GUI package yet?

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Update
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Woohoo! I have that great sense of accomplishment that you get when you overcome an obstacle that is driving you nuts! What has been driving me nuts? How in the heck are you supposed to obtain the world-space vertex positions from limbs that have been scaled and rotated? I thought it would be something fairly easy, but I was wrong. Getting vertex coords for an object that has been scaled, displaced and rotated is one thing, getting that information for a limb of said object is a whole nother story. So what exactly does this have to do with WeedWorks? Well, it is critical for placing little pretty flowers in their proper locations It is also critical for individual blade vertex manipulations. So what this means is you can now modify every aspect of the grass after it is made, in a very simple manner.

The white boxes are vertex positions and are in no way meant to demonstrate flowers or blooms of any kind (although they sorta look like it).



Thank you Dmitry K for your fine additions to vertex manipulation and data regarding matrix 4 transforms. And thanks to Diggs for offering some advice.

I am off for the weekend, Saturday i am headed out on a nature-adventure to some volcanic underground caves and waterfalls. I will be sure to take some lovely photos while I am there!

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Another Update -
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Following today's work I knew it wouldn't be hard to get the flowers where I wanted them (programatically), so here are a few screenies of the programatically generated flowers. The flower photo itself is a photo I took (see previous posts).




Ok NOW I am done till monday