Real-time continuum grass

Abstract

Simulating grass field in real-time has many applications, such as in virtual reality and games. Modeling accurate grass-grass, grass-object and grass-wind interactions requires a high computational cost. In this paper, we present a method to simulate grass field in real-time by considering grass field as a two dimensional grid-based continuum and shifting the complex interactions to the dynamics of continuum. We adopt the wave simulation as the numerical model for the dynamics of continuum which represents grass-grass interaction. We propose a procedural approach to handle grass-object and grass-wind interactions as external force that updates the wave simulation. The proposed method can be efficiently implemented on a GPU. As a result, massive amounts of grass can interact with moving objects and wind in real-time.