http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2014/05/14/witness-ps4-progress-report/

Actually, if you keep digging in the halftoning literature you will find that blue noise is one of the standard halftoning techniques :) It is not my area of expertise, but I believe that in general the patterns used for haltoning were driven by other factors besides just theoretical quality, and so semi-nonsensical things like green noise were actually used as well (see http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=green+noise+halftoning&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C48&as_sdtp=) because there were physical constraints on the way printers worked that meant that “ideal” reconstruction patterns were sometimes infeasible in practice.

But, like I said, not my area of expertise, so I’m not actually sure how much actual use some of these research results got in practice (ie., in actual printers).

– Casey

Thanks for the random avenue of geekdom for my evening.

But in the last few pictures, I can notice some regular patterns in the grass right in front, where the spacing are obvious, because of the deterministic process you took. Maybe a little bit of randomness is not that bad, since we human brains are very good at detecting patterns, as long as it’s there, it will be noticed. And I think a grass field with regular patterns is not very pleasing to the eyes as well. Hope you can find some way to overcome it.

Casey,

Great.

-Stuart

Apparently the ‘reply’ breaks if you get your first Re-capture wrong :/

Stuart,

I was doing this additional research for my own edification, but the results have been promising enough that I think I probably will go back and add this option into the grass planter, just so we can see if it makes a big difference in-game. Even if it ends up being too late to leverage significantly on this project, it will be valuable to know for future projects.

– Casey

Joe and Sven,

The problem here is that I am not trying to simulate the placement of actual grass. Actual grass is about growing individual blades. That is something that I have simulated for off-line rendering off images, but it is unfortunately not yet fully practical for games like The Witness. In off-line rendering, the individual blades are rendered and they are often “combed” as well, to produce things like trodden paths and simulated cutting or consumption by animals.

So what these patterns are meant to do is place textures that themselves contain many blades of grass, and you are trying to distribute these for visual coverage. The behavior of actual grass is completely unrelated to how you want to place these textures. Actual grass forms clumps and gaps naturally, and also grows with interlocking curvature, things which you don’t want to do when you’re trying to minimize overdraw and maximize the utlity you get from a series of textured cards.

Hopefully that gives some insight into why studying grass isn’t particularly relevant to this problem, although I would encourage doing so for anyone dealing with placement on the actual blade level, as I have found studying real grass to be very helpful when working on that sort of project.

– Casey

Or are you creating some sort of manicured Disneyland type experience? If that’s so, I’m going to expect jumping fountains and an EPCOT center too with Mickey letting me take pictures with him. And a monorail. Gotta ride teh monorail.

Exactly! I also thought it could be useful to question how grass actually grows. And if you think about it, the fact that nature spreads the grass seeds in a certain way automatically implies that it can’t be a completely random process. But implementing this is probably easier said then done.

Other than that i thought it was a very interesting and well written article.

Maybe that’s something I’ll look into sometime