Latest developments - does anyone really care anymore?
Nowhere else to put these so they go here I guess. If the thumbnails don't show up full size, delete the '_th' part from the URL in the address bar when you open them and they should open fullsize - it's a bug I think.
3D animated grass, this stuff takes a LOT of grass and it's taken a long time to make it work well - somewhere around 130,000 faces to cover a 1km square terrain in a grass carpet, all animated with a hacked version of Racer's flag shader (the animation looks really good, better than it does for flags). If you assume that every textured face contains 64 blades of grass, that makes 8,320,000 textured blades of grass.. cut the grass into 200m square patches and LOD them and then tweak the mipmapping so that they don't go out of focus too quickly, it actually runs quite smoothly and it looks really, really good..almost FC2 or Crysis good:
Terrain stencils, basically a shader where you can paint more detailed textures onto a terrain using a greyscale stencil image - if you've ever used UnrealEd or tried stencil layers in blender you'll see what I mean - the great thing is that you can seamlessly merge textures, look at the edge around the water where the grass meets the rock. I'm trying to get 3 layers or more to work but code isn't my thing, I need to work out how to change the Blending between textures for that to work - at the moment it's just
texture1.rgb*stencil.rgb stuff, that's about the limit of my maths skills:
Finally, good old waving flags. Just random logos pulled from Google images and painted onto flags, notice the flag of the Democratic Republic of Blender ;-). TBH, I'm not in love with the flag animation, it doesn't look as good as the grass does (the flags look kinda elastic) But it still looks good with flags waving around..