Overgrowth takes place in the savage world of Lugaru where rabbits, wolves and other animals are forced to use paws, claws and medieval weaponry to engage each other in battle. Combining 3rd person adventure platforming with intricate melee combat, Overgrowth achieves a unique feel. Overgrowth also benefits from Wolfire's brand new Phoenix Engine which has been built from the ground up to allow the use of cutting edge graphics, animation, and physics. Add to these exciting features Overgrowth’s realistic artificial intelligence and streamlined control system and the result is an astoundingly immersive experience.

Post news Report RSS Smooth plant rendering in Overgrowth

This is a behind the scenes look at how we render plants with smooth edges in Overgrowth using our engine made from scratch.

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When we are rendering many objects on screen at the same time, we only have a few hundred polygons to allocate to each individual plant. We use intersecting alpha-mapped planes to give the impression of much greater detail. Here is a picture of what our desert tree looks like with the alpha channel used for color instead of transparency:

Tree

If we just turn on blending, it starts to look like a tree, but there are serious artifacts around the leaves. The transparent pixels in the nearest leaves are occluding the background leaves. The following pictures are zoomed in ~200% for clarity; click to see the full image.

Tree

We can fix that problem by turning off depth-writing. But now you can see the background leaves in front of the foreground ones!

Tree

We could draw everything in the correct order by sorting each quad from back to front, but this is slow, and intersecting quads would have to be split. In practice, the most common solution is to turn off blending, and turn on alpha-testing. That is, for each pixel it checks if the alpha value is above some threshold, and if so, draws it at 100% opacity.

Tree

Now we have everything drawn in the correct order, and it looks like a very detailed tree, but we have lost the smooth, blended edges. This is especially problematic when viewed from far away. Here is an enlarged distant view with alpha-testing used on the left, and blending on the right.

Alpha Compare

One way to get smooth edges using alpha testing is to use the multisample buffers. By using a different stippling pattern in each alpha buffer, you can combine them to get fairly smooth gradients.

Tree

However, this option is not supported well on many 3D cards, and only works well with 4x or more samples per pixel. What we are doing right now in Overgrowth is drawing the plant using alpha testing, and then drawing it again using blending with depth-writing disabled. This is not perfectly accurate, but it is compatible, easy, and fast.

Tree
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Post comment Comments
Skamberin
Skamberin

Looks very good and a very interesting read. I always wondered what methods were used for smoothing out edges on things like foliage and hair/fur :)

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RogerRamjet
RogerRamjet

Looks great. The end result is a vast improvement to others I have seen working... nice work...

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vfn4i83
vfn4i83

Looks great you guys are doing a awesome job. Cant wait to see it finalized.

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ShinobiNFC
ShinobiNFC

wow, I've had that extra pixel issue on so many engines and programs I've worked on in the past. This may not solve it but I'm very glad I at least understand the origin of the problem now.

Thanks very much for taking the time to explain this issue.

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Relto
Relto

Who knew trees would actually be this interesting.

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Herr_Alien
Herr_Alien

He he, nice read there! I am curious to see if I can apply something like this for other (closed source) engines by appropriate manipulation of some settings etc.

Cool article!

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Jesternz08
Jesternz08

interesting stuff, thanks :D

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DuckSauce
DuckSauce

nice article :)

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MrMattWebb
MrMattWebb

Fun read. Thanks!

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Bird_of_Prey
Bird_of_Prey

Fascinating. Great article! The game is really looking nice!

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