What could be hiding in the grass? A giant spider waiting to shoot it’s venom in your direction or maybe an undead skeleton torso crawling toward the sound of your footsteps?
A lush environment is crucial for immersion and suspense. I have been pushing towards a baseline trying to solve various performance issues to open up these possibilities. I now have a working block model system so I am not constrained to just blocks in the core terrain generation.
This allows for doing streamlined block models which are more efficient than details. Usually there are many of these and they are mostly the size of blocks or close to that. They also follow a more procedural approach to generating the mesh. Think slabs, stairs or grass, etc. from Minecraft. They work with the block based lighting interpreting the lighting levels onto the model and also blocking light themselves. They are really in-between basic blocks and the detail system which are full models built using Blockbench spanning many blocks.
This first implementation is a simple plane/texture grass block model. It has features like a range of sizes that are driven by a position based deterministic hash. It also has two different textures for each direction and these are also randomized by the hash. I may also do a third plane and offset the rotation based on the hash. There are lots of possibilities just with this one block model.
