Blitzgrass3D released ..

Community Forums/Showcase/Blitzgrass3D released ..

SabataRH(Posted 2004) [#1]
Blitzgrass is a total solution for developers wanting to
insert large portions of grass, weeds and numerous types
of foliage into their scenes. The system supports insane
amounts of inserts and allows for very professional
outdoor application building.

Features:

>> Tested engine code for 3d-grass operations.
>> You get all the source code you need for easy use in your application.
>> Layer a complete map in lush, vivid foilage as frame rates stay high.
>> Inserting Blitzgrass is as simple as a single command call 'Include "blitzgrass_include.bb"
>> Over 5 years of outdoor game development dumped into this package!
>> Single-surface techniques used.
>> Over 22 media types included, or include and define your own.
>> Alpha channels and texture masking supported.
>> Traditional X,Y,Z or colormap(heightmap) placement supported.
>> Seasonal settings supported. Works flawlessly alongside of blitztree3d.
>> Use the preset color types or define your own to match grass to any terrian style.


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For more info and a demo download check out the offical Blitzgrass3D website at Aliencodec.
Aliencodec Website


Pepsi(Posted 2004) [#2]
Looks very pretty! To bad the demo is about dead slow for me. It's like a frame per 5 seconds for me. :/

Ofcoarse, my GForce4 MX 420 - 64mb is probably to slow these days for them there perty high-end graphical demos.


Perturbatio(Posted 2004) [#3]
Demo runs fine for me, although it would be nice to see things like FPs and polycount.


Da MaN(Posted 2004) [#4]
Looks awsome!
To bad it wont run on my slow as dirt computer!


SabataRH(Posted 2004) [#5]
Perturbatio, you are correct! fps and poly need to be shown. I also want to leave the colormap out so you can spray your own grass onto the map and try out all the types.. I'll compile a new demo and add a readme for the grass spray procedures..

Should have it up in a hour or so..


JoshK(Posted 2004) [#6]
I'd rather see a less-dense demo that ran at 100 FPS than a crazy-dense demo that runs at 50. Rendering foliage should take a minor part of your rendering time, considering that a real game will probably add another 30,000 polys to the scene. I suggest making a demo with a larger area with less dense foliage that runs at a higher FPS. Of course, Blitz only renders so fast, so I assume your speed will be no better than any other masked single surface mesh.


xmlspy(Posted 2004) [#7]
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SabataRH(Posted 2004) [#8]
Okay as promised i repackaged the demo and added a few things. I accidently left terrain detail at 8000 in the last demo :( was testing some fake bump effects.

The new download allows you to take the blank color map in the directory and paint grass onto the surface... save it and re-run the demo and you'll see your creation... View the readme.html file for further instructions.

New Link: http://www.aliencodec.com/products/blitzgrass3d/BlitzGrass3D_Demo.zip

xmlspy, probably not. But when I finish the last two blitz outdoor projects im working I will most likely release a suite package combining them all. But for those that don't want the complete package I will continue to sell them indivisually as i am now.


SabataRH(Posted 2004) [#9]
xmlspy, as far as the crossed planes are concerned - theres an option in the include file that tells the system to apply additional cross patterns to each grass type... You just have to tell it how many.


Craig Watson(Posted 2004) [#10]
It looks amazing. Works fine here too, but I do have fairly recent hardware.

The demo size appears to be mislabelled on your website.


Falelorn(Posted 2004) [#11]
Looking great Alienhead,

What are the other two outdoor projects?


xmlspy(Posted 2004) [#12]
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sswift(Posted 2004) [#13]
Using a Blitz terrain in a demo where you're trying to show how fast your system is is a bad idea. Blitz terrains render slowly. Of course the amount of detail in the terrain affects it's speed but your terrains look pretty smooth.


sswift(Posted 2004) [#14]
Might I also suggest:

1. Very hilly terrain creates overdraw, which slows things down.

2. The scene would look better and run faster with half as much grass.

3. I'd rather see lush green vegetation than dead looking vegetation.

4. Masking instead of alpha would not only speed things up quite a bit, but would make stuff appear sharper. Alpha requires the 3d card to look at what is behind the object. Of course, I'm not entirely sure that Blitz actually implements masking in such a way that it makes a difference.

5. Your alpha blending of objects as they receede into the distance could use work. There's a big tree there with leaves at the top that always look transparent. You should use a near/far clipping distance like Blitz supports for entityautofade. That way you can make the objects fade suddenly within a short distance, rather than fade slowly as they move away from the camera creating unrealistic levels of leaf transparency.


sswift(Posted 2004) [#15]
Oh and I get about 20fps in the demo, on a Geforce 2 equivalent on an AMD 2400.

Ps:
Skyfab sounds very much like a new system I'm currently working on. So you're gonna have some competition there. :-)


Ross C(Posted 2004) [#16]
Impressive stuff man!


Isaac P(Posted 2004) [#17]
Id like to see a large open landscape with lots of grass spread out over it so i can see how efficiently it manages the grass... also blitz terrains are prolly eating up half of the fps.


Filax(Posted 2004) [#18]
Very good job :)


DH(Posted 2004) [#19]
Oh and I get about 20fps in the demo, on a Geforce 2 equivalent on an AMD 2400.


I get about 24-32 FPS on a Geforce 4400 128 mb card. P4 2.6c (hyperthreading), 800 FSB and 1 gig DDR 333.

I was more impressed by your original speed test rather then this. The grass has transparancy issues (z order I assume) and becomes more evident as you look from the other side of the lot.

As swift said, use masking rather then alpha transparancies. It will make a big difference, not only in speed, but in look as well.

I'd rather see a less-dense demo that ran at 100 FPS than a crazy-dense demo that runs at 50. Rendering foliage should take a minor part of your rendering time, considering that a real game will probably add another 30,000 polys to the scene.


Same here. With my outdoors stuff I am going to have to take more time doing physics, animation, etc rather than hope that the grass lib leaves me any extra cpu ticks.

Don't mean to cut you down here, just some suggestions. Grass is hard to accomplish, and I think your on the right track. However I would suggest a bit more testing before actually releasing it next time.


SabataRH(Posted 2004) [#20]
Thanks for the comments guys..

Okay as stated in the list info, alpha or masking is supported. A simple flag changes between the two. The grass is setup to handle either setting.

A large demo wasnt presented because - I had already finished the smaller map demo.

Blitzterrains are being used becuase - that's what blitz offers for terrains. True they arent the fastest but ...

Autofade or entityalpha has no effect on vertex colored surfaces..

The system supports numerous types of seasonal/coloring data.. I elected to use dry/dead vegitation only because it was diffrent and it was currently setup that way in my code.

Thanks for the comments!


sswift(Posted 2004) [#21]
"Autofade or entityalpha has no effect on vertex colored surfaces.."

I don't know what you mean by that. Entityalpha and autofade most certainly do affect vertex colored surfaces. But I never said that you should use autofaade or entityalpha.

You fade the quads out using vertex alpha as they recede into the distance, do you not? All I was saying was that LIKE ENTITYALPHA, you should allow the user to specify a near and a far distance. The near distance being where it BEGINS to fade... This way you can make the difference between the two small, and alpha will only kick in when the object is real close to the point where it should dissapear. So it will fade in and out more quickly, and not be transparent up close.


SabataRH(Posted 2004) [#22]
For vertex colors to show up you must set the EnityFX flag to vert coloring... after doing so alpha's have no effect to the surfaces..


fredborg(Posted 2004) [#23]
You can set the VertexAlpha flag, and then use VertexColor to adjust the Alpha of the Vertices :)

Oh, and nice stuff!


Ken Lynch(Posted 2004) [#24]
Looks good but I only get 9FPS max on my P4 2.6GHz with Radeon 9200 :(


sswift(Posted 2004) [#25]
"For vertex colors to show up you must set the EnityFX flag to vert coloring... after doing so alpha's have no effect to the surfaces."

That's because you didn't also set the vertex alpha flag, as Fredbord said.

But if you're not doing that, then how is it the tree appears to have different alpha on different leaf quads?


SabataRH(Posted 2004) [#26]
Fred, as i thought as well but when tring this I get no alpha on the trees, it appears full or completely invisible. Driver related? or am i doing something worng ? :(

Sswift, those light fades on the trees are from the channels imported from the texture themselves... I hope we are on the same topic here hehe.


SabataRH(Posted 2004) [#27]
I got a revised version coming out today, it'll fix those lower fps on some of your systems.. I found a much better way to cycle the distances than my previous experiments...
My early tests are showing upto 80% improvment in speed and visibility.

Im toying with adding animtions to the grass.. although it'll be purely optional of course..


sswift(Posted 2004) [#28]
"Sswift, those light fades on the trees are from the channels imported from the texture themselves... I hope we are on the same topic here hehe."

No we're completely on the wrong topic here. :-)

The ALPHA fades. ALPHA. Transparency! :-) The leaves are TRANSPARENT. You can SEE THROUGH THEM. And not just the areas where you WANT to be be able to see through them. THE WHOLE QUAD. :-)


Rob(Posted 2004) [#29]
I can't see any grass, just weeds. And it runs at 100fps, which means it'll run at 5fps on my old pc.


SabataRH(Posted 2004) [#30]
The new version (coming up) supports an occulison type system. It breaks the game space up into cells and builds the surfaces from that locale... Easily put on timer checks so checking only the cell to the cam is very fast.

This will make HUGE maps containing millions of grass entites possible. It also breaks the distance up for other things like animtation..

I've only got the new style patch-worked in atm but hope to make it an offical release today or tommorow at which time i'll post a new demo featuring a gigantic terrain.

Grats on the new computer Rob.. :)


IPete2(Posted 2004) [#31]
Alienhead,

I hope you don't mind me saying this...it's really about BlitzTree I guess

You know I really, really want to like this demo... but there are a couple of issues which are still making it just very good and not, WOW!

Nature doesn't move like the branches do in this demo. I think it would not be difficult to implement something which would really change the natural 'look and feel' of the demo.

When a branch sways in the demo, it sways one way, stops, and sways the reverse way. This is just too mechanical for me.

In nature, when branches sway, they change in speed as they reach the end of their movement, their speed is not linear it has a trajectory feel to it, so it slows and comes to a halt, gently, and then slowly accelerates back to a nominal speed in the opposite direction, slowing again as it approaches the end of its opposite sway, beginning the cycle again.

This sway also varies in size, it is not always the same distance each way.

I think that your demo is very good, but could be greatly improved by the addition of this small extra coding.

The second issue I have is something which I don't know how you can fix. When I'm under a tree and I look up, the effect is like looking through a Kaliedoscope, everything rotates to stays the same in an effort to face the camera. This too has a very unnatural feel to it.

Sorry to be critical but it is just what I see.

As for fps this demo runs at 35fps on my Athlon 1900+ with 512MB ram and a 64MB nVidia Ti-500.

IPete2.