Guild of Writers

Hey guys.....how would you do some of the plants?

More specifically, the small whisps of wild grass and the small brush that you see in Ages like the Cleft, Relto, Er'cana.

Now, I know a good way would be to import those Ages and take a look......I did, and they are not there! For some reason, they are not being imported into blender. Instead, you see the ground with it's textures, but no small brush nor the little runs of grass here and there.

So how would you go about doing it? This is for a desert Age, not anything lush like a forrest or jungle.

In Cyans ages, plants and bushes and trees often use simple planes (that are viewable from two sides) and paints a leaf/bush part/branch with leaves on it.

The way they compose several of these objects gives the illusion of a real plant.

IIRC the bushes in the desert are actually made up of about 3-6 planes, oriented so that they complement each other 3d-wise...

EDIT:
And as an image says more than a thousand ramblings:
Here is tree import from relto:


You can see how the tree is made up of only planes...

Also try Kierra's Aerie Age. She's done a good job on those trees.

Thanks. I'll give it a whirl, all though there are no tree's in this age. Cactus, yes, but no trees.

You should model the cacti (shouldn't be too hard) and then use a billboard for the spines. If you want, I'll have a go at this--I've been wanting to model some cacti.

For brush like in the Cleft (and Relto) you should just import it and not steal them of course but take a look at those--those are really well done bushes, but you need the texture skill to do those too.

I'm pretty sure Tsogahl/Noloben/Relto (with a Live page)-style grass is not accomplished in the same way, but with some kind of shader.

-Kato

The grass blades in Relto are actually modelled individually and don't use any transparency (or any textures for that matter).. Just a bunch of very thin untextured polygons.
The good thing with that technique is that it looks good (the blades can be bent individually, unlike flat transparent bilboards; and they can actually be lit) the downside is of course that it adds a whole lot of polygons to the area.. Cyan can get away with it on Relto because it's a very small area, but I probably wouldn't do that in one of my Ages. (at least not until some LoD management or other optimisation are included in PyPRP).

As for why those aren't imported that's an interesting question. I remember it being asked like two years ago when PyPRP was doing its first baby steps, and I think someone said because they used some specific LoD system, and so it was a specific kind of PRP object that wasn't handled by PyPRP.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the blades of grass in Noloben also independently modeled? I just mention it because that age is significantly larger than Relto.

The "long waving grass" style is an effect that exists only in Myst V and MOUL. It is accomplished using a Shader Modification.

The grass in noloben and tsogal is a texture (with transparency) showing a row of blades of grass, mapped to planes. The shader modification is a vertex shader that skews the tops of the planes to make the grass wave. The same effect can be achieved without the waving animation. For an example, look at the tsogal grass in relto in MOUL. I've tried to approximate the same affect with my own grass texture in the willow area in odema.

Wouldn't a simular shader not work in TPOTS? Cyan does use shaders I believe to render the water in the city, hood, etc. Why wouldn't a different shader not work?