How do Major Video Games Render Grass?

[@simondev758]

Patrons can now vote for the next video! Thank you for your support. ❤ Support me on Patreon: www.patreon.com/simondevyt 🌍 Live Demo + Courses: simondev.io

[@cicik57]

is it possible to clip bottom parts of grass what are not visible?

[@LacklusterThoughts]

It seems like online games, like in milsims where render distance is far. Have a really bad problem with grass if you ever feel like analyzing it.

[@road2nohand]

can you please pleas pelase host this crazy stuff

[@deanolium]

For the wind, try giving each blade of grass a random 'stiffness' which goes from 1 to 0.8 or so then use this to multiply the effect from the wind. That would give a little bit of variance to each blades movement which would make it feel a little more realistic, since each blade will have slightly different resistance to being moved by the wind.

[@simondev758]

Good idea!

[@gibraelkotwal6894]

Wouldn't that take a hell of a lot of computation power?

[@squidwardstesticles5914]

@@gibraelkotwal6894 not really, just a single random number generation and multiplication per blade. Of all the things done in the video that would probably be one of the least expensive things

[@simondev758]

@@squidwardstesticles5914 To add, GPU's are measured in TFLOP's these days, to give you an idea of just how absurdly powerful they are.

[@RiversJ]

They aren't particularly 'powerful' really, per die / computing unit theyre Way weaker than most mobile phone CPUs, the difference is better modeled conceptually by comparing mentally a high pressure hydraulic line at 600 atmospheres but it has tiny diameter, while the GPU is a firehose, not nearly as fast but boy does it move a Lot of stuff. The SIMD concept or something similar is very important to understand for graphics programmers if you don't want to be like some new 'AAA' titles that get their shaders 'proper' fixes by modders to make them run well. Essentially you want to make sure everything is as flat as possible, that you write in aliased manner from memory without in-flight conflicts (read only done right is ok). There's no getting around learning the fundamentals of SIMD architecture if you want to be good at graphics programming.

[@theblackquill5921]

THe more you render grass the less you touch grass

[@anirbanbose6996]

100th like

[@vextormull]

Quote for generations to come

[@Thorfinn0607]

year 2400: "go render some grass"

[@AshishGautam-v5y]

Haha​@@Thorfinn0607

[@Viilap]

​@@Thorfinn0607😂

[@neoshenlong]

Dude, you are like "yeah I'm just messing around" and then build a scene that looks absolutely amazing and far better than like half of the games I can think of right now.

[@wille84fin]

And it doesn't magically just vanish (stop) after 30-50 meters like in 90% of games today..

[@freakinmonkey85]

…running in a browser

[@nerdError0XF]

​@wille84fin man... he just made a tech demo of grass. In real games you need to optimize your games to be more accessible and like... aside from grass you need to render and compute billion other things lol I honestly can comperhand how people compare tech demons and real playable games

[@asandax6]

Simon: "I'm just messing around" (Proceeds to make one of the most awesome grass scenes that looks better than some games released in 2023)

[@lmancz]

in a browser...wtf

[@michael-zv5xq]

Part of that would be because the performance and the engine they chose to make the grass lol

[@Raevolpe]

​@@michael-zv5xqIt has nothing to do with the engine, it's the people using it that matters. Bethesda can't to shit with their engine but modders make better job and optimize things. Same goes for unreal engine games, some people optimise and others don't, frostbite too etc.

[@SteveLEKORodrigue]

I'm mesmerized by how good this stuff can look. I'm not a game developer, but you make me want to become one. 😁

[@Yadobler]

Makes me want to be a render engineer instead of game development

[@lilbahr]

Epitaph

[@alex-qn5xp]

It's easier than it looks once you know what you're looking at.

[@Shifae_]

I'm 44 and trying to teach myself UE5 using KZbin videos. There's no reason why you can't.

[@SteveLEKORodrigue]

@@Shifae_ : I'm already working in game industry (network infrastructure).

[@B0ltSoft]

As the developer of GrassFlow, I approve of this video. It's weird how familiar hearing about their grass setup feels to how I ended up developing it. Ghost of Tsushima actually inspired me to add bendy grass and stuff at the time because I was jealous they could do it and I didn't have it. That was back when using geometry shaders though, now it's just raw mesh instancing baybee. At one point I hacked together an experiment inspired by nanite using a compute shader based micropolygon software rasterizer to render a truly insane amount of grass with like 1000 triangles per single clump and hundreds of millions of triangles at like 2K 450 fps. I wish it was practical to implement that more generally. But cool nonetheless

[@simondev758]

That sounds super cool!

[@GRAYgauss]

Sounds so cool I hate to say I actually don't believe you. Any scraps on github?

[@zeekjones1]

I'd add the actors move vector to the "wind" for a given area so the grass gets a little push as you pass through.

[@AnimusAgent]

The fact that this was made in Javascript is mind-boggling for me as a web-developers that have been working with JS-related stuff for about 10 years. And as always, awesome video!

[@joaovitormeyer7817]

Three.js uses WebGL, wich is just a way of using OpenGL in the web, so while it is indeed JavaScript, the havy work is all done on the GPU and JavaScript just uses it. I'm shure you know that but to me it feels like cheating to say that this was done with JS (performance-wise)

[@greggoog7559]

Web technologies have really come such a long way that I'd personally go as far as saying that native code is unnecessary in 95% of use cases.

[@Mnmn-xi6cj]

@@greggoog7559 browsers can indeed pretty much do anything, I'm just not sure whether that is even desirable. Wouldn't be surprised to see browsers replacing the OS entirely 😅

[@LittleRainGames]

@@greggoog7559 Until you move to huge projects.

[@askeladden450]

​@@greggoog7559for rendering and games? Javascript is good for toying around or experimenting, but if u want to make anything fullscale, native is absolutely the way to go.

[@playonce4186]

To be honest man, this grass looks artisticly unique and very beautiful. I really love it ! One of the best grasses I have seen in a game. The more realistic something is to real life the more it looses that childlike connection and desire to that play game. Your grass has a a type of characterstic to it which i find very wanting to run around the grass meadowy hills.

[@simondev758]

Thanks!

[@RGSTR]

I used to dream of becoming a game programmer. Now, I watch technical videos such as this, and enjoy them a lot. Thank you!

[@seriouce4832]

Simon, consider this: Since the video compression really messes with the grass details far away, you could consider this step: Simply upscale the video to 4k and upload. This sounds a bit silly but the 4k stream will have much more bitrate and the grass will look much nicer, even though it is technically still a 1080p video. The upscaling does not make it nicer, but the higher bitrate does - and you won't get that from youtube without increasing the resolution.

[@simondev758]

That is a great idea!

[@clonkex]

​​@@simondev758We upscale our videos as well to force the better codec that KZbin won't give us unless we have many subscribers (although you probably have that codec already)

[@luizarthurbrito]

KZbin uses a significantly higher bitrate and better compression from 1440p onwards. Sometimes, 2k will do the trick!

[@JOCoStudio1]

Agreed. No. matter the resolution of the source file, you should always upload at the highest resolution possible to tap into that higher bitrate. Wish KZbin would just decouple resolution and bitrate, but it is what it is.

[@gruuli]

you are all right but its not only about bitrate as you think, it is also about the codec used by youtube: keyword vp9

[@DavidsKanal]

Love how you're doing your tutorials in the browser - not only is it easier for people to view this demo, but it also constantly reminds people of the power of modern browsers and what you can make with them. I much prefer this approach over fiddling around in some heavyweight engine like Unity.

[@jabadahut50]

And browsers are only getting more powerful with additions like WASM and WebGPU. As these technologies mature, the only things that will really be holding the web back from being the primary way to deliver games will be tradition (good luck getting a steam user to move away from steam), download speeds (as large assets will still take a very long time to download), and browser cache size (though there are already ways around this now so this one is less of an issue.)

[@leo-oh1bc]

​@@jabadahut50and Logic also. Browsers should focus more on being a way to get and send information on internet instead of trying to become another operative system Browsers should get simpler, not more complex, It Is already too complex to develop a browser from scratch even for Microsoft

[@niceowl]

​@@jabadahut50the Steam client does more than just downloading games. Do you know how big of a performance impact the browser makes? With the sandbox I'd imagine it to be quite big

[@Onaterdem]

@@jabadahut50 Are there any benefits to "the web back from being the primary way to deliver games"? Why would we move towards such a future?

[@nicholasmaniccia1005]

@@Onaterdem Ease of access, and more control over your own product. Business 101 in trying to make a great product that makes a lot of money is to try and cut out any middlemen and buy and/or sell direct from suppliers and to consumers. Even drug dealers know this.

[@mattwayne9128]

Some of the best javascript and game dev content on the Internet. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. I'll definitely be looking into your courses (when I get some money).

[@theranpan_]

Almost everything bounced over my head but I loved the video for some reason. Subscribed because I wanna watch remaining videos you have uploaded.

[@kingcrimson_2112]

you are a true wizard. And I absolutely love your approach of tutorial making. Please dont stop, its inspiring.

[@zarblitz]

I think the real value of this video (aside from the great approach to grass) is demonstrating how to turn a description of a methodology into an implementation

[@LewisRidyard]

I recently watched the same GDC talk, after playing the game for the first time, and wondered how it could be approached in the browser. Super cool to see your thought process, especially around the points you chose to focus on vs simplify. Great stuff. Really loving your content both here and on Twitter!

[@4.0.4]

I'm absolutely impressed by how good of a result you got for what is basically a throwaway toy demo. Love your explanations.

[@hydraulicsystems332]

This looks very nice, if you really want to sell the wind illusion you could make the butterflies be slightly perturbed by the wind waves.

[@wafi5576]

the plot twist at the end got me. amazing

[@pklpklpkl]

As someome tuning into your optimization analysis, that last sentence made me choke. I wasn't prepared, but am impressed

[@The_Pariah]

As someone who codes but doesn't write video games, I love watching stuff like this. When I play games, I constantly think about some of the nuances. Grass/vegetation is something I constantly think about. It's neat to see the code that drives this kind of stuff. Geek-friendly and enjoyable.

[@michaelpease2103]

At 5:40 that grass would already work really well for a stylized game. Good stuff

[@omgabaddon]

that grass movement looks fucking sick, it looks like actual wind is moving across the field, and it's just a tiny square... bro

[@spaaaaace8952]

You're, sir, are insane. You changed the way I think about JS.

[@JordanBeagle]

Crazy they have to model every blade of grass!

[@_jurd]

Last year I wrote this for Unity HDRP but got stuck building artist tools to paint grass and creating a system to bake a heightmap based on multiple meshes. Thanks for motivating this programmer to get back to work!

[@xdanic3]

I'm curious about how you would do this in unity, do you have a single object for all the grass? Do you model the grass and import or create the mesh inside unity?

[@_jurd]

​@@xdanic3 Currently, it's created in a C# script with each chunk being its own mesh. From my research it's the only feasible way to support important HDRP stuff like deferred lighting. It's probably not possible to only use one object (mesh) as you'll probably very quickly overload the index buffer which when formatted to 32 bits supports about 4 billion vertices.

[@kerch00]

I noticed a difference in the real life video you took of some grass, where vortices are formed in between blades of grass moving them horizontally instead of just vertically. You could introduce some random movement in the blades proportional to the perpendicular of the wind to create a more varied/realistic look.

[@maalikserebryakov]

The last scene you made literally drew my breath away. 😍

[@jixal]

That is nuts. Really excelllent result! I'm not a coder but it was very interesting to follow your steps.

[@Draxen]

Absolutely insane, you sir are a genius. Thanks for another informative and fun video 🎉

[@SomeRandomPiggo]

The Perlin noise really did it, looks like real wind!

[@BRZguy]

It's really amazing how much games have improved in this area. Back in the day, you'd be lucky if you saw a couple static blades of grass and a green ground texture in a large open area. Nowadays it's all over and individual blades are modeled as well as have movement with the wind and player.

[@shootnblankz187]

aliased grass is the bane of every gameplay experience lol. Looks pretty good!!!

[@hund1267]

I just wanted to add a rooman for the algorithm, but also your ego. This has on so many LODs so much quality that everybody should believe in humanity again. Thanks for your humble work.

[@kkodingg]

I didn't expect you would mention browser at the end. It caught me off guard. Though, I was a little confused why there was javascript in the middle of the video. Anyways, Great stuff! Looking forward to see your next videos!

[@simondev758]

Yeah, it's amazing what JS can do these days. I mostly use it out of ease and convenience.

[@thevoidunknown]

Definitely going to check out your courses first chance I get. Please don't stop what you're doing, this is some of the best dev content out there!

[@GamePhysics]

Looks great! I was shocked when you said it's running in a browser. Impressive!

[@asherspira]

Watching this video, seeing the program slowly come to life was as amazing as the final product 🙏

[@Kujeful]

That was some lovely grassing and nice outcome! Thank you!

[@kipchickensout]

Just listening to your voice while watching that snack-sized video summary of something so interesting is a nice way to start the evening

[@AbrahamZilberstein]

This makes me excited like a child, that things like that can be done by a human being. Definitely worth learning

[@mav45678]

Awesome video. The grass movement is not looking much like wind to me. More like someone was moving a grass carpet from underneath.

[@nicolaslanglais]

the thing that would sell it would be player collision detection

[@alexjeffrey3981]

What a banger of a topic! I've bumped into this issue a few times working on my own lil games, excited to hear your perspective

[@ManiakPL22]

I love how often beauty is crated from simplicity in computer graphics. When you look at it all it often feels overwhelming, you can't stop the optimalizations and you just marvel at how the fuck does my computer even handles that? and then you hear it explained, and it's still beautiful, but there is something more to it for me, since it is made with nothing as complicated as my brain made it out to be. No matter if high fidelity, stylized, or something else I think most often the most beautiful games prove to be the ones that get simplicity right, not the other way around.

[@anon_y_mousse]

I love how so many channels I watch keep showing all these techniques for doing grass. It's really making me want to make a lawn moving game. Although, I'm wondering how I might apply these techniques to have a room of tentacles like say you're on an alien planet and there are tentacles coming from every crevice.

[@simondev758]

That sounds awesome, some nice cutting mechanics and fluid sim for slime flying everywhere.

[@No_True_Scotsman]

Oh damn I bet people would love a lawnmowing game. Look how much they love Powerwashing Simulator

[@Memeieli]

You truly make the best Indepth videos on how to do these techniques. Your truly amazing.

[@Memeieli]

Id pay money for a more in depth course that follows more of the talk or just other techniques as well. GPU instancing a bunch of geometry like horizon zero dawn has been something ive been trying to learn for a while. Is there any chance u could cover rendering trees/rocks and other geometry with compute shaders?

[@simondev758]

100% yes I'm holding a poll on Patreon right now on the next video, 2 potential topics are how to render 100's of thousands of objects easily, the other is how to manage enormous scenes, basically 2 different spins on rendering a crapload of stuff. I will eventually build up to how games like Horizon, etc. use compute shaders for modern gpu driven rendering.

[@SierraSierraFoxtrot]

Their blending from 15 to 7 vertices is CRAZY. PS I'm not a graphics pro but I've been around for a while and I've never seen this technique. Does it have a name?

[@youknowho4439]

This is one of the biggest difficulties for me as a beginner in Blender. Wanting to design the environment, and render it, AND add animations AND maybe custom assets is pretty easy. When you learn the basics. Hoping to get there.

[@NickStagakis]

Sadly the youtube video compression does not like the grass moving towards the end of the video. Still very beautiful though!

[@tufanaydin6340]

I am absolutely tuned about to buy your courses. I loved your knowledge.

[@vici83]

Everytime that I beginning to lose the direction of what I'm doing, I come back here and get that glow on the eye back. Love your work.

[@AmazingMaxStuff]

Thank you so much Simon!

[@visionary_3_d]

Great video. The grass looks great! I'll try the movement tricks here at some point 😋

[@Crempsen]

Someone "without an artistic eye" cut it out, this looks amazing

[@simondev758]

Hah. I've worked with so many artists over the years, and they have always been clear that I should stick to the tech.

[@addmix]

This guy just does not miss. Absolute GOAT

[@dhawaljoshi]

grass does look good, it's amazing to see this was done in JS

[@TommyLikeTom]

this video has shown up on my feed like 10 times each time with a different thumbnail. I just came here to say this, I know how all this is done.

[@simondev758]

Ya, gotta play around with the thumbnail, first version was pretty bad

[@phutureproof]

fantastic! as a simple web dev this stuff blows my mind

[@raphaeljaggerd3585]

This is awesome. Im not smart enough to understand these talks but thanks to you i now can. If possible please try to recreate the physics driven animation GDC talk for uncharted

[@nacs]

Fantastic narration and video. Love how it's paced well but still concise and to the point Oh and the final result looks fantastic

[@_prothegee]

Those grass looks great with wind simulation

[@Novanimator]

You deserve more recognition bro, this is amazing

[@AndersonMancini]

Wow. This is just pure gold man. Thank you so much Simon. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

[@jonhulsart]

I get so scared of playing dark souls but after watching this video I want to play it again. thank you for this experience

[@strokkur24]

Holy shit. Holy fucking shit this is awesome! This grass looks so good I that I want to go out and touch some. All jokes aside, the grass looks insane. You got youself a new subscriber mate

[@christopherfrancique9912]

looks so good. dusk scene fire!

[@eboatwright_]

This just looks absolutely amazing!! Makes me want to get back into graphics programming

[@Lucas-hh4oh]

What a great video you have here! Instant sub!!

[@spider853]

Not sure you added that delay, but I think their grass wind is affecting the Bezier handles first then the end points, like with an offset delay to get that smooth bend motion

[@Nebulaoblivion]

Your results are really cool, thanks for sharing!

[@robertwallace5498]

SimonDev is a god among us, best videos on youtube

[@sandwich.entity3810]

Would be interesting to see what small variations in height, either from a noise map or maybe just random offsets, would look like?

[@itsMBWAAA]

my god ive been looking for a game dev math course for months! years maybe!

[@hamzzashaffi]

Thank you for sharing these videos with us! :)

[@Mcs1v]

Ey, another high quality content from you. Thanks! :)

[@Bvngee]

This is so cool. Makes me excited about computers again. Thank you very much sir :)

[@Bluesky35102]

This looks amazing! Awesome video

[@simondev758]

Thanks!

[@dpatulea]

Wow. It's amazing! Thank you for your share!

[@NamanArusia]

Damn man this is insanely impressive. And the thing is when you go step by step it actually makes so much sense, like an obfuscated memory was unlocked.

[@MonsieurFlange]

Looks amazing! I'd love to see how you'd implement player influence on the grass movement

[@simondev758]

I didn't really call it out in the video, but there's a video on my twitter of player influence. Added it for fun, but just didn't feel like it needed to be included on YT.

[@Bravest-d3k]

that would of it the video for me that beautiful end part with a player walking threw the grass almost pushing it to each side, love the buttflies too@@simondev758

[@Limofeus]

Looks really neat! Is there a web demo for it by any chance?

[@yoyooo2008]

great tutorial, easy to follow and the results is really nice

[@dev_reimu]

The end genuinely killed me.

[@marverickbin]

Pretty smooth, a task that seems so heavy. Also, javascript!!!

[@tigerwolf8338]

Thanks for your game-math course!

[@oscoorpgames]

Can You Please make A Full Start To End Detailed Video For This Grass Features In Unreal Engine 5 .

[@0x8badbeef]

Ghost of Tsushima does a novel thing with the grass. Most games have some sort of navigation system. Ghost of Tsushima points the blades of grass in the direction you should be going. Likewise with the wind.

[@shayhan6227]

Sony makes some of the best exclusive games that are graphically beautiful and innovative and also incorporate good story telling and game mechanics. It was insane how Ghost of Tsushima didnt get game of the year. Other great games were Last of Us, Uncharted, God of War, etc.

[@HuynhLuong227]

wow, long time no see, welcome back with threejs

[@GameDevAcademy]

Great video. Thanks for sharing.

[@NotGarbageLoops]

Absolutely incredible. Well done

[@Mampinator]

OMG THANKS. I used noise and it looks like grass from far away. that was my original solution.

[@vishnuvarma2826]

Really amazing video! These videos keeps me more interested with game dev! Just subcribed your channel! Great content 🫡😎thank you ❤

[@Callie_Cosmo]

Wait, running in the browser? I’m sorry, right at the end there, the BROWSER? This Is Running, In THe BROWSER???

[@Desopolis]

Great as always! This would be a great addition to the shader course. I think I’ll give this a shot some time this week to see if I can replicate it. I’m curious to see the performance and with some of the acerola ideas how optimized it could go.

[@simondev758]

I think we do really similar things with chunking and LOD'ing, so I wouldn't realistically expect performance to be substantially different any difference in the shaders. My shaders likely being more complex since they're both doing all the Ghost of Tsushima stuff + deriving from the full lighting and shadowing system from three.js. Memory wise, this uses almost nothing. The vertex format is heavily compressed, float16's for offsets, uint8s for the vertex itself. It would be even smaller, if not for some problems with three.js that I didn't feel like overcoming. The path forward for optimizing likely includes doing what they mention, which is aggressively swapping out tiles 4:1.

[@Desopolis]

@@simondev758what kind of FPS were you getting? I’m hovering around 20fps on my 3060 which seems super low. I’m wondering if it’s a problem on my end

[@simondev758]

@@Desopolis I've now tested on 3 different systems, vega64 was running at 100fps no problem, no idea the actual top framerate, 4080 was the same, and my old surface laptop was getting 35-40 fps for just the grass. 20 fps on a 3060? Yeah, something is seriously wrong. Maybe try it again with the latest, I removed a lot of the extra passes that I added just to take the video, should be mostly grass Although tbh, those passes are mostly basic ssao and stuff, I didn't write them, but they shouldn't be so heavy weight to even bother a 3060.

[@SuboptimalEng]

Michelin star chefs are afraid of this man cause he can cook.

[@mmilerngruppe]

The butterflies who don't give a fuck about the wind are awesome!

[@simondev758]

Giving af about the wind is expensive and harder heh.